LET ME SET THE STAGE:
This post will be about 5 Beginner Mistakes I made in Self-Publishing one of my book series and what I did about it -- which was pretty much nothing. I'll also go into what I am going to do about it now that I learned a lot more about what went wrong.
Most of these mistakes were ones that were not even on my radar at the time they were made.
Let me give you a bit of context: As I came close to retirement, I decided to write a novel or two. I chose to self-publish for many reasons that I've gone over in other videos and I won't go over now. And to this day, in spite of the mistakes I've made, I still consider self-publishing a good fit for me. (Just me)
When I first got the idea of writing a novel, I did research for about a year. I read several how to books on every subject under the title of writing a novel and self-publishing. (Cat on book shelf)
I also watched hundreds of videos on the subject. Like most people, all the information I came upon, especially in video format was great advice, but none of it was curricularized. When you self-study online, you take in just a steady stream of random information and then we're all left to sort it out ourselves. That's how free education works on the internet. (Text Panel 2: Information wasn't curricularized
So above is a list of the chronology I pieced together as being the proper chronological list of how to write and publish a book:
MISTAKE NUMBER ONE:
In this big cloud of random information I took in, I got ARC Readers and Beta Readers kind of mixed up or thought they were too closely related. But they are two different animals.
Beta Readers often times read books very early in the process -- before the book is even finished to give early feedback. This is a great idea if you're not sure about your characters or if the plot is good enough, etc. Let's face it, in the beginning it's hard to think you're book is a masterpiece when it's your first one -- at least it was for me. There is a definite high-level purpose in having Beta Readers. They are worth their weight in gold.
However, here is where I made the terrible mistake and found out the hard way about this particular landmine: I offered my Vampire book Darius - A Vampire Story as a beta book but it had not been finalized, professionally edited or proofread. Now, in the ad copy for the link to download, I clearly posted it as a beta copy that had not been edited, etc. However, once a book is downloaded to an eReader, no one will remember this book is only a beta copy. And the second mistake I made here was that I didn't put anything in the book itself.
I didn't put any explanation paragraph before the First Chapter. I didn't add a watermark. I assumed my explanation about the Beta copy that invited the download was enough.
Well, when I finalized the book and released it, I got slaughtered in early reviews. I assumed as a new author that maybe it wasn't that good. However, several of the reviews referenced typos and/or grammar mistakes. When I went to the finalized copy to of course correct them -- they didn't exist.
The first time this happened, I just thought the reader was a bit crazy. But after this happened several times, it was only then that I realized that I had released hundreds of beta copies that now lived on people's eReaders. And for some reason, there are a lot of readers who take typos or grammar errors personally. It seems to trigger them and their reviews are more like rants.
So poor Darius got all beat up in the early review.
MISTAKE NUMBER 2
Mistake Number 2 was what I did about this problem -- which was pretty much nothing.
I wish I could say that I recognized the gravity of the mistake right away, but I didn't. I just thought that some people had read an earlier copy and that's a shame, but what can I do about it now? I didn't realize that there were probably hundreds of these copies out there. I had no list of who I sent these early copies to.
Now, I also didn't realize that this series was going to go on for 5 books. So, in hindsight, what I should have done was pull the first three books and re-release them as a second edition. This is what I plan to do in January of 2025 because that's when I'll be releasing the fifth book in the series. So doing nothing about this was the second mistake.
Now I have a hard and fast rule: I never give Beta copies in download format. I now only pay for beta copies and send them in Microsoft Word format. I also include verbiage that it is a beta copy and hasn't been edited or proofread.
MISTAKE NUMBER 3:
GoodReads is probably the largest single pool of avid readers and book lovers out there. But goodreads can be a tough crowd for new writers. This is where Darius's bullying started. If I had to do things over again, I would not have focused on Goodreads as a first place to release my books -- even after they were fully edited and proofread. Unfortunately, many of the videos I watched during that first year, talked about how great goodreads was helpful to find beta readers and arc readers and launch a book.
To be honest, I never found any true beta readers or arc readers there. I found mostly people who like to download free books. So I would just caution newbies that GoodReads is not the only game in town and you may need some boxing experience before you enter that ring. That's all I'm going to say about that.
A SIDE NOTE ABOUT GIVEAWAYS:
Goodreads has been purchased by Amazon, I believe, and they did offer a giveaway for $119. At least that's what it was at the time I used that service as a giveaway for edited books. However, I found the reviews very harsh or even snotty at times. I had much better experience giving the books away with Freebooksy and even Fussy Librarian for less than $119. I also got better reviews using Bookfunnel and Storyorigin free book giveaways. As long as you don't put your books into Kindle Select, you can still give them away on these websites.
MISTAKE NUMBER 4:
I didn't realize that the categories on Amazon have a hierarchy to them. It may have been because we were originally allowed to put each book into 10 categories. I had watched a video by Author Chris Fox about writing to market and he was explaining about drilling down in the categories and writing to a specific sub-category. Now, he writes sci-fi and in particular, military sci-fi.
At the time he said this, I thought writing to a specific market just to make marketing easier would be awful. It would be like pulling an assignment out of a hat and having to produce a book about it. I'm just not that type of writer. So I let that concept float away in the wind and just picked ten categories that seemed like they would be a the best fit for my books and the rest of the concept of writing to market was lost on me, at least at that time. I moved onto other things.
Over time, pretty recently, I did figure out that the categories are hierarchical and Chris Fox' advice came back to me. What he was saying was that new authors can focus on subcategories in order to dominate in those smaller categories in their to number 1 on the best seller list. In other words, you can rise to number one in a sub-sub category way faster than rising to the top ten in Romance, which is a top tier in the hierarchy.
In the video below, I do go live at Amazon and demonstrate how the categories are hierarchical and how to dig down and see which ones are available for you.
So the time to think about the categories is before you even plot out or write the book. Once you have a plot idea, that's the time to look at the categories and think about where the book would fit, and what you can tweak about the storyline to fit into a sub category or a less competitive category? Can you make the story happen in the west to be a Western Romance? Can you put the story into olden times to make it a historical novel, ore even better, put it in a specific time period? The time to think about categories is right after you have know you have a workable plotline.
In looking back, I could have tweaked a few of my books to fit them very easily into sub-sub categories without changing the storyline much.
MISTAKE NUMBER 5:
Mistake Number five requires a little explanation. My inspiration for my vampire series was the old Dark Shadows Soap Opera from the late '60s and early '70s. I never watched it as a kid but everyone I knew did. I didn't watch it because I had to walk too far to get home from school in time. This vampire series, like most soap operas at that time, was melodramatic and being a gothic and supernatural story, the storylines were completely crazy. But I loved the show anyway.
What I didn't realize at the time I watched it was that these crazy storylines came from real books. They just seemed crazy to me as they played out in this soap opera. In fairness to the writers of Dark Shadows, they had to produce 5 shows every week without fail.
So, with limited knowledge of the whole vampire genre, I went on to write a vampire book series. My vampire owns and operates a funeral home and keeps a bevy of 3 women to supply the blood he needs. He normally picks up runaways from the train and bus stations, but he winds up falling in love with the daughter of a wealthy, influential family in Newport Rhode Island. There is also a monastery of monks that live on the opposite side of the cemetery that Darius also owns.
No one in the area has any idea they are living next to a vampire and there are some supernatural events that start happening around the Balmont Funeral home, one of which is a mobster from New York looking for his daughter who was last seen with Darius. That's all I'll say about the plotlines.
Now, my series does follow the classic rules on vampirism with a tweak or two. However, there is also a little subtle tongue in cheek narrative in the story, which was more prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s vampire movies.
So how does all this fit into mistake number 5? Well, there's no category for tongue-in-cheek vampire stories. Also, fifty years have passed since this show ended and a lot has happened to the vampire genre in that time. First there was Anne Rice and her books and subsequent movies which are all dead serious and there's no tongue in cheek humor of any kind. I only read the first book and it was steeped in darkness and despair. Because I read for enjoyment, the level of despair was too much for me so I never read the other books.
Then there were the Twilight movies, the TV shows of True Blood and The Vampire Diaries, which were targeted to much younger people. Some of the backdrops were high school or college. And there was the rise of the vampire hunters. My book is a vampire book for adults or young adults who are not interested in high school or college anymore. But there's no amazon category for vampire books for adult. And my books also have no vampire hunters.
None of these were on my radar when I wrote the book. I thought books were judged on how well they were written and if people liked them. I didn't know reader expectations was even a thing!
Then I came upon two videos on a channel called Tristan and the Classics that changed that. It changed my whole trajectory and sent me on a new journey where I learned so much information that is not only helpful but I consider it crucial for newbies.
So as I realized that my books were not really fitting well in any of the vampire categories, I went on to create my own Teach Yourself Gothic Literature course based on Tristan's suggestions. This journey helped me to understand more about writing to market, and about reader expectations in particular, both are which I now feel are critical in self-publishing.
I actually took Tristan's suggestions about the self-study program one step further which I'll go into in the next blog post and video.
CONCLUSION:
So to sum things up, this is the new chronology that I will now use and suggest to beginners that this will be more helpful to you regarding what comes first and then next in writing a book:
And below I'll post my new hard and fast rules on Beta Copies and ARC copies:
Below is a Video I did on all of this in case you want to view it too.