Things that Keep You from Writing Your Book

Some of you may recall from previous blog postings that I am writing a book. You may further remember that I have decided to self publish and reading this I think that my reasons may have been sound:
"- Writing a book is hard work
- Most authors make no money
- It's almost impossible to find a publisher
- Once a book is printed, that's when the real hard work begins. It's called sales and marketing. By the way, the publisher will do very little sales and marketing. It's up to you."

I'll say amen to the first: it has been quite an eye opener to be reminded of how much work is involved.
Making no money I am prepared for for though obviously I would hope to cover my costs and perhaps make a small profit.
The real reason that I didn't see much point in hawking it around publishers was that [a] its a lot of hard work, [b] it then takes ages to get the thing printed and out there and [c] like it says there; they don't even then do much by way of marketting, its really up to you/me the author unless you are a megastar like JK Rowling or get discovered as a potential megastar. Frankly a book on praying the Lord's Prayer just isn't in that league!

So I reckoned that publishing it myself means it gets out there sooner, I don't have the added heartache of publishers saying 'no' until perhaps finally someone decides that it fits with their market profile and if I am going to have to do the promo anyhow ...

The downside is that I do have to put up some money probably in the region of £250 to actually get everything sorted that I need.
Anyway, I'm into the final stages at the moment. It's written, proofread, I have pictures which I have taken and editted and I am currently fine-tunig the format and drawing up plans for marketting. I will be using some of my redundancy money to prime the pump and away we go.... scary though.

Oh and the nearly unique selling point: there's an interactive element for readers to share their own ideas and read further ideas from me and other readers. It represents my foray into the world of wiki and you can find the nearly term embryo here.

Needless to say this blog is part of the marketting strategy! -And so you will read about it here about it here when it's available. I hope that it will cost no more than £8 and it should be obtainable in North America from a printers in Canada, but I'm not yet sure how that works. It will have an ISBN and so it will also be picked up by Amazon in due course.
Blogging about Incredible Blogs - by Ken Leebow: 10 Things that Keep You from Writing Your Book