Waiting For Amazon

(This is step #11 of my How To Publish An Ebook thang.)

One of the annoyances of publishing with Kindle Direct Publishing is that you must wait for about 12 hours from when you tell it to publish your work until the time it becomes available.

While you're waiting you can redeem the time by reviewing your plans for promotion and advertising. I'm by no means an expert in these areas. In fact, I really think my efforts in this regard have been substandard. So, listen to someone else about promotion and advertising.

In fact, I'm considering hiring out promotion and advertising next time I self-publish something.

So, let's talk about hiring work out. Nobody can do everything at an expert level. That's a real-life corollary of a couple of my earlier blog posts about writing about superlatives, and writing here and here.

Take a survey of yourself. Can you write? Can you copy-edit? Can you do art? Can you write advertising copy? Can you do video production? Can you write press releases and follow up on them?

(I hope you can write. Otherwise it makes little sense to self-publish ebooks.)

For each of those things you either can't do, or feel incompetent doing, or have others tell you you're incompetent at--you should consider hiring that work out.

I've talked about how I got an artist for my work here. But I also hired out video production, copy editing, and web-page design. I think that next time, I'm going to do some more crude cartoons and story-boards.

Consider this image. It's crude and ugly. However, it served its purpose admirably: to help figure out composition and colors.  I wish that when I was defining Finding Time's trailer that I had put together crude story-boards. Likewise, my web page FindingTime.Poling.Info would have come together faster had I created some crude drawings.

Next time, I'll draw up a lot of simple sketches on a white-board, photograph them, and send them to my friends doing the art, design, and video.

I think I could have more quickly and more surely communicated my vision for the following trailer had I created storyboards like this.

 

(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)