The Accidental Author

Why did I write this series?

Welcome to the introductory book in a series of ebooks about writing and ebook marketing for beginners. This series is based on my experiences and is aimed at debut self publishers possibly struggling with limited resources and technical expertise as they start out on their self publishing journey.

Quite simply, I quickly realised that I was unprepared for working in the writing arena of ebook marketing after I wrote and published my first travel memoir in November 2013. I soon learned that writing for publication, although solitary during the crafting stage, relies on networking and social media activity to gain exposure for your work. As someone who had a personal Facebook account to communicate with my children when we lived overseas, I was unprepared for what would be required of me as my career progressed. The necessity for social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to help me build my brand as an author and to sell books became glaringly obvious.

I am not claiming to be an expert in the field of writing or book marketing. I seek only to share my acquired knowledge in the hope that it helps others to overcome some of the early hurdles less painfully. The fact that I am able to call myself an author, something which has always been a pipe dream, is now a pleasant reality. For this I am extremely grateful as I know there are many people to thank for helping me achieve my dream. Everything that I aim to share with you has been learned as a result of researching, participating in webinars, groups or forums as well as trialling variations of book marketing techniques for myself. The methods I used and which I will be sharing in this series have been used on my non-fiction work to date. These methods are currently being tried by some of the Rukia Publishing authors who write in many of the other genres and I look forward to sharing with you how the results vary between genres on the Rukia Publishing website and on our social media pages. There are a few things I learned early on this journey. Firstly, regardless of genre, it is not enough to simply publish a book and hope it will sell. Secondly, you cannot rely on friends and family to promote your book indefinitely. Lastly, for now, if you are serious about selling books and branding yourself as an author you need to establish a reputation and build a 'following'. It is the building of my 'following' that I found to be the most enjoyable part of my journey to date. In turn this has been the driving force in the development of the Rukia Publishing support network for self published authors. Our aim is to provide a resource for gaining exposure, being able to network with readers and consequently gaining a following.

There are numerous experts and books available that claim to be able to help you develop your promotional skills in the many areas of book marketing. However, some of these people and their methods are inaccessible to debut self-publishing authors due to the costs and technical resources involved. It is in the early weeks and months that you need some easy to implement methods, some motivation and above all the confidence to grow as not only an author, but also as a book promoter. I hope to offer an entertaining introduction as I share some of my experiences to help you get started. Earning money from writing is renowned as a struggle, even for established authors. In this increasingly popular, and in some genres, flooded marketplace it is easy to become disheartened. I encourage you to focus on small goals, both financial and professionally. As they say 'Rome wasn't built in a day' and great buildings need solid foundations. Therefore, invest in yourself by gaining confidence in your abilities and build the foundations of your own successful writing career.

In this series I will share tips and methods for using social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, as well as blogging and author websites. We will look at how networking and growing a mailing list is an essential part of planning for the future, and how making your books available to readers via aggregators worldwide for a variety of e-reader devices can be achieved as your knowledge grows, and with limited financial investment.

Book 2 in this series - 'The Amateur Authorpreneur' will describe, using the What, Why Where, When, Who & How template, the process of taking the first steps into combining the craft of being an author with the business of marketing your work.

If you are reading this as an established author then feel free to have a good laugh as a newbie shares her naivety, but feel free to contact me to share your experiences so that I can share them on my blog to inspire, motivate and educate other new authors.

If you are just starting out on your journey then I hope you enjoy my story. Take from it what you want or need, and follow the series to help grow your followers and increase exposure to your books.

If you are a reader wondering what it's like to be a self-published author and what's involved in producing a book, then enjoy reading about the reality.

For those of you who are readers of any of my travel memoirs or are followers of my blogs some of the extracts may be familiar, however as these ebooks are aimed at a slightly different audience please bear with me as I aim to explain and demonstrate using my personal experiences with examples.

So let's get started.