It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of publishing your book, especially when it’s your first book. What an accomplishment! You can’t wait to tell family and friends about it. You’re eager to hold your book in your hands. The urge to publish is overwhelming and lures many authors into rushing the process.
Authors who are new to publishing or haven’t researched what actually goes into publishing a quality book often learn to their detriment that haste does not serve their books’ best interests. Following are five common mistakes new authors make when publishing their first book.
1. Lack of Professional Editing
Did you know professional editors who are also authors hire other professional editors? We’ve learned through hard experience—our own and our clients’—that the author is always too close to his or her own work to see its flaws. We see what we think should be there. What trips up a reader makes total sense to us because we know all the world-building background the reader never sees.
2. Poor Book Design
Page design entails a lot more than filling the pages with words. It involves specialized knowledge and skills that most people never learn. If page design concepts like tracking, kerning, leading, rivers, widows, and orphans don’t mean anything to you, then it’s important to hire someone who does understand what they mean and why they’re important. In addition, the publishing industry adheres to standards of quality and precision that consumer-level software or word processing programs cannot attain. When it comes to page design, that software is Adobe InDesign.
Sure, you can learn page design, and I’m not telling you not to learn. However, I strongly recommend that you hire a pro while you’re learning. Don’t inflict amateur work on the unsuspecting public.
3. Amateur Cover Design
Again, graphic art is a specialized skill set that most authors don’t command. From specialized software to sophisticated design principles, it takes a skilled professional to understand the how and why of effective artistry and design when it comes to book covers.
And don’t think that AI-generated cover art will save you money. AI-generated art is fast, cheap, and easy, but it’s usually not good. Also AI-generated cover art makes potential readers wonder whether the author also used AI to write the story. Readers who are willing to pay for the product of human effort are not willing to pay for machine-generated content.
If you’re a skilled graphic artist, more power to you! If not, hire a professional.
4. Failure to Market the Book
Over 2 million books are published every year. Added to the plethora of books published over the last millennia or two, that equals a lot of books. This means your book has lots of stiff competition, even within your genre and especially if you publish within a popular genre.
To buy your book, potential readers must be aware it exists and next be persuaded that it’s worthy of their time, attention, and money. To do that, marketing is necessary. Marketing is not the same as advertising, although it includes advertising. Marketing refers to building awareness and stimulating demand. Authors market and sell their books through advertisements, social media promotion, in-person events, etc.
Marking is an academic degree and professional field, so don’t expect to master it quickly or easily. Effective marketing requires strategy and consistent, robust effort. It requires knowledge, skill, time, effort, and money. The less you “spend” on any of those, the more you’ll “spend” on the others.
5. Unreasonable Expectations
Many new authors are duped into believing that publishing a book is a quick and easy path to fame and fortune. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Today, everyone knows about self-publishing. They know no credentials are necessary for anyone to publish a book. Therefore, the adage that publishing a book will help you establish instant credibility doesn’t hold true either.
A few minutes of online research will show you the depressing statistics: over 90% of self-published authors earn less than $1,000 per year in royalties, and two-thirds of traditionally published books never sell more than 200 copies or earn out the advances paid to their authors.
Self-published authors often refer to famous and rare examples of other self-published authors who later became household names, such as Andy Weir who wrote The Martian and EL James who wrote Fifty Shades of Grey. They dream of a major publishing company picking up their self-published book and soon attaining best-seller status, fame, and fortune.
The reality is those examples are so well-known and prominent because they’re so incredibly rare. As a general rule, no literary agent or publisher will take any interest in your self-published book unless it sells like those proverbial hotcakes. And if your book is selling that well, then—congratulations!—you don’t need an agent’s or publisher’s help.
So, What’s an Author to Do?
Authors who make a living at being authors treat it like a business. If it’s not a business, then it’s a hobby. Bear in mind that most people don’t try to monetize their hobbies: they gleefully spend money on improving their skill, on equipment, and on other things related to that hobby because they’re passionate about it. There’s no shame in pursuing a beloved hobby.
First books are notorious for poor performance. You may never recoup your expenditures through book sales. Don’t let that discourage you. Learn from the experience and apply those lessons to improving your next book, enhancing your marketing efforts, and adjusting your expectations.
Writing a book should be a pleasure. Publishing your book should be an adventure. Do it because you’re passionate about the stories you have to tell.
And if you want to pursue commercial success, then improve your chances by hiring a team of professionals to help you achieve the quality readers demand, expect, and deserve. Contact Hen House Publishing to help you get there.
