Amateur To Published: The Fiction Writer's Guide To Publishing

1 - Plan your Career

To up your chances of success you need a plan - a business plan. Your plan will help you when you're making decisions about what to write, how to write, how to edit, how to publish and what marketing strategies you'll use.

To plan your career:

STEP 1: IDENTIFY YOUR GOALS

What do you want from this venture?  Everyone has different ideas of what it means to be a successful author. For one person success is having published twenty books. For another person it's topping the Amazon best-seller list. Someone else defines success as the ability to pay all their bills from their earnings. Another person simply wants to say that they were published by a traditionally publisher.

So what's your goal?

Sure you might want to have all the above but aiming for all of them at once will mess up with your ability to focus. Choose one goal and commit to achieving it.

STEP 2: EDUCATE YOURSELF ON TRENDS WITHIN THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY

The publishing industry is very volatile and competitive. If you don't keep up to date with what's going on, you might miss key opportunities and be caught unawares by changes. You'll need to read/google a bit for this step but I promise it will be worth it. For now this is what you need to know:

- How book publishing and marketing has changed over the years

- Types of publishing and the pros and cons of each.

- The best traditional publishers (Penguin, Simon&Schuster etc), the advances they are currently offering authors, and the royalty cut they expect.

- Online retailers (Amazon, iBooks, Scribd, Barnes & Noble etc) and publishing aggregators (Draft2Digital, Smashwords etc) that are out there, what they offer and what royalty cut they expect.

- How current writers structure their businesses and what tasks they believe are most important for success.

- Legislation and tax laws affecting the publishing industry in your country.

- The most popular genres currently and the major players i.e. authors with the most readers

You can find most of this information by doing research through search engines or looking at Amazon's bestseller list. For more comprehensive information visit forums like KBoards Writer's Cafe, Writer's Sanctum & Scribophile. Also, visit the blogs of writers/influencers who maintain a pulse on the industry. Check out David Gaughran, The Creative Penn which is run by Joanna Penn, A Newbies Guide to Self-Publishing that is run by Joe Konrath ect.

STEP 3: DISSECT THE MAJOR PLAYERS

In every industry, you'll find people who are extremely good at what they do. It's the same for the publishing industry. We have the mammoths like Stephen King, James Patterson, Nora Roberts who kill it on the charts. Then we've got lesser known people who aren't quite as popular but are making very serious livings writing such as Amanda M Lee, Michael J. Sullivan, Mark Lawrence etc You need to know who these players are and what they did and are doing now to become so big. Why? Because they've already done what you're trying to do. There is no need to reinvent the wheel when you can reinvent the wheel.

The fastest way to do this is to find 3-5 writers (preferably in a genre you are interested in) by searching Amazon's top 100 writers. Then study:

- The trajectory of their career i.e. when they started, when they got big, if they are still as popular as when they started

- the genre they write and common story-lines in their books. (you'll need to read their books)

- their writing style, how they start and end chapters, favorite tropes etc

- how they package their books i.e. how their blurbs are written, titles of they book, the kind of covers they have and if there is any recognizable branding

- social media platforms that they are most active on and how they use these to launch and market their books and themselves.

- their websites, what's on it and how they are using their websites to further sell themselves and their books

- interviews they've given about their success and the steps they believe helped them to achieve that success

- their mistakes over the years and how they corrected them

If you're lucky, you might find how-to-books that these authors have written or articles/blog posts. Even if these books cost money, it's a good investment. Trust me.

STEP 4: COME UP WITH YOUR OWN SUCCESS BLUEPRINT

Knowing your goals and studying the writers above will help you chart your own path to success. To create your own blueprint, you'll need to outline steps that you'll take to achieve your goals. Steps could include:

- Write 3,000 words every day

- Publish a book every two months

- Update my Twitter/Facebook/Instagram every evening

- Save $5 each day towards hiring a good editor and cover designer

- Post a free chapter of my book on Wattpad each day.

- Approach one agent each week

Look at what the successful authors did to succeed, then mimic them.

Comments? Questions? Ask below and I shall  try to answer.