Creating Your First Book
The Problem
Creating a book is an awesome achievement, but it isn’t achieved without a lot of effort and that effort is expended over a lengthy period of time. Many authors, when creating their first novel or book, don’t appreciate or understand exactly what they are getting into: a multi-phase, long-term project.
This project can be outlined this way.
Phase 1: Planning the novel
Phase 2: Writing the novel
Phase 3: Publishing the novel
Phase 4: Marketing the novel
Phase 5: Managing a novel
What each phase involves is explained below.
Phase 1: Planning: For a novel, this activity is called Story Design. It’s where you embed all your creative ideas into the story elements such as characters, plots, settings. For a nonfiction book, the planning mostly involves research, sometimes extensive research, and organizing that research into a logical order.
Phase 2: Writing: In this phase you spend your time banging on the key board and cursing at the screen or staring out a window.
Phase 3: Publishing: These days an author has options to chose from. These range from the traditional way involving an agent and a publisher to self-publishing with several options in between.
Phase 4: Marketing: No matter how the book is published most, if not all, of the marketing responsibility falls on the author.
Phase 5: The business: After all this activity, many authors are shocked to discover they now own a business. This sudden promotion to CEO of a business to market and sell the book can be upsetting.
Another facet of reality is that writing the book does nothing to prepare the author for the daunting tasks of publishing, marketing and organizing a business. The usual remedy is to do a lot of research and/or studying as each phase of the project unfolds. Too many times, the next phase comes as a surprise to the author.
There has to be a better way!
The Solution
I’ve written over 30 books, most, but not all, self-published. I’ve stumbled through all of the phases listed above a few times before I mastered the process. Recently, I decide to develop a thorough explanation of all the phases in a comprehensive way that would save new authors from experiencing the frustration of trying to figure out each phase as it unfolds.
The initial part of the project involved whiteboards instead of books. This took a bit of time and the whiteboards became quite expansive. Over all, the whiteboards have in excess of 475 cards with each card containing a piece of information such as text, video or a downloadable file. I used the Scrintal app as the software to develop these whiteboards and I ended with a total of eight of them. You can find the master whiteboard with links to the other whiteboards here: https://beta.scrintal.com/b/author-ecosystem-master-board--bnrgc
I also rearranged the phases this way:
Phase 1: Planning the book
Phase 2: Writing the book
Phase 3: Starting the author business
Phase 4: Publishing the book
Phase 5: Marketing the book.
One of the principle objectives in this project was to arm the new author with the information needed to understand the entire scope of creating a new book. In other words, I wanted to eliminate surprises for the author.
Understanding the scope of the entire project has an interesting side-effect; it lessens the possibility that the new author will fall prey to scam artists. These scammers prowl the web searching for such authors and ‘offer’ to help them. The reality is that their ‘help’ is only aimed at emptying the author’s wallet or purse.
In this revised arrangement, the author starts the business after the manuscript has been completed and is getting worked over by an editor.
While whiteboards are a great way to display vast amounts of information visually, unfortunately, they have a very limited exposure. You can’t, for instance, put the whiteboards on Amazon where everybody can find them.
This conclusion led me to decide to use the whiteboards as models for a series of short ebooks packaged under a single title.
My objective with all this work is to simplify the job of the new author by explaining the complicated process of creating the book.
The ebooks listed above were created one at a time. For a brief period, I thought about publishing them as individual books, but that represented a waste of resources and money. The series would require a lot of ISBNs, covers, etc. For economic reasons, I decided to package the series into a single book.
Creating Your First Novel is the result of all this activity. It’s slanted toward fiction writers rather than nonfiction writers but it has a lot of content on publishing, both traditional and self-published, marketing and business.
The book is available in print and ebook editions. You can pre-order the ebook until October 15.
https://www.amazon.com/Creating-Your-First-Novel-comprehensive-ebook/dp/B0CJ7ZPYCZ/
The book is part of an author ecosystem I’ve been creating. Another part of the ecosystem is my website called Writers & Authors Resource Center or WritersARC. The link to this website is:
https://hankquense.podia.com/