“Design works not because people understand or even appreciate it but because it works subliminally.” – Erik Spiekerman

Erik Spiekerman is one of the world’s most renowned book designers and typesetters, with over 323,000 followers on Twitter. We interviewed him last year at Reedsy and left us with this perfect quote. The core principle of design remains the same, whether it’s applied to apps, websites or books. It’s more than making something “beautiful”, or “appealing”, it is there to subliminally influence the experience of the user/reader.

When you open a book, you don’t think about the margins, the spacing, the font, the drop caps, the scene breaks; however all these interior layout details subtly influence the pace at which you read, and can go as far as create an atmosphere for the story.

The cover assumes a similar function. I often hear designers saying that they create “eye-catching” covers. I always wondered, what does “eye-catching” mean? Surely, flashy colours, big fonts and strong contrasts are eye-catching… But that’s not what they are referring to. A good cover is there to catch the attention of the right audience for your book. It needs to convey the story, the atmosphere, the genre in one single image or illustration. Again, it works subliminally in the mind of readers: when walking in a bookshop, or browsing through an e-retailer, our attention span for every cover we see is of just a few milliseconds. Choosing the one we pick up is a decision vastly influenced by our subconscious.

Because design works so much in the subconscious of readers, it tends to be neglected by a majority of self-publishing authors, who are often on a budget. Since starting Reedsy, we have seen a huge interest from independent authors for working with professional editors, less so for working with a designer (especially when it comes to interior design or typesetting).

Self-publishing and the rise of templates

Typesetting is not cheap, especially since today’s technology in this field is not all that up-to-date. After investing in editing, proofreading, ebook formatting and (sometimes) cover design, most independent authors can’t afford to hire a book layout designer to design and typeset the print edition.

Moreover, it is no secret that self-publishing is predominant in genre fiction, where the layout of the books is actually pretty straightforward (no images, tables, graphs, illustrations, etc.). As a result, more and more “template services” have emerged in the past few years, making indie authors’ lives easier when it comes to print and e-book formatting. Some websites sell them (like Joel Friedlander’s Book Design Templates) while others make theirs available for free as part of their publishing services (like Bookbaby or Blurb). Our Reedsy Book Editor, which we released this week, also leverages the efficacy of templates, while providing more customization possibilities.

This DIY tendency and the “templatisation” are arguably a good thing for simple interior design, but the same cannot be said for cover design. No survey has been carried out to firmly back this up, but it is my impression after two years of working with independent authors that professional book design is still being vastly underestimated. Most authors coming to Reedsy for editing either create their own covers themselves using royalty-free images, or purchase pre-made covers (the equivalent of “templates”).

The problem with this is two-fold: first, authors are generally just as good with images as designers are with words. The low standards in DIY book design have given birth to entertaining websites such as Lousy Book Covers or Kindle Cover Disasters.

Then, on top of the quality problem, the automation capabilities of digital publishing and the rise of self-publishing raise the question of the standardisation of book design. Even publishers are more and more wary of taking chances with covers, and want their professionals to stick to strict genre guidelines (look at how many thrillers have fog and pine trees on their cover). This is something I’ve discussed several times with Reedsy designers and they share my impression:

“I think there’s only a small window of time in which you can emulate an idea and still be successful. The rest of the time you’ve got to try something different. It is a risk, and although people have to take risks, they usually don’t want to be the first one. Even publishers will say to me: ‘this book has sold quite a bit and it looks like this, can you do something similar?’” – Stewart Williams

So what is my fear? Simply that we are moving towards a time where books within a same genre will pretty much look the same, inside and out.

New formats and opportunities for differentiation

Of course, this is a slightly pessimistic view of the current state of book design in the publishing industry. The popularity of “star typesetters” like Erik Spiekermann proves that millions of people out there are still passionate about layout design and typesetting. The thriving of independent publishers who place a high value on design, like Faber & Faber in the UK, is another sign of this.

Moreover, though digital formats have introduced a form of “standardisation”, they have also opened new doors to authors, publishers and designers. You can adapt your novel into a graphic novel. You can create limited hardback editions of a successful book, with custom typesetting and design. You can create “apps” for children’s books, offering a more immersive narrative experience. There is almost no end of possibilities.

While new formats can be expensive to produce, they offer a unique opportunity for authors and publishers to “go the extra mile” for their readers and differentiate themselves. They also create new distribution and revenue channels: audiobooks, apps, games, etc.

In the end, “design” is there to there to both support the story and make the book stand out. This is just as true now as it was before the emergence of the digital formats. It is taking self-publishing authors a bit of time to realise it – and to admit that crafting stories and crafting covers are two very different skills. The ones who do, however, are way ahead of the competition.

In the end, “design” is there to there to both support the story and make the book stand out. This is just as true now as it was before the emergence of the digital formats. But it is taking self-publishing authors a bit of time to realise it – and to admit that crafting stories and crafting covers are two very different skills. The ones who do, however, are way ahead of the competition.

So if you’re just starting out, and becoming a “professional author” is your goal, I will leave you with three simple design recommendations that will immediately get you much closer to your objective:

• Hire a cover designer: even if you know what you want on your cover, even if you have sourced the image yourself, hire a cover designer. You don’t have the knowledge of typography, space and arrangement that designers have. And you don’t have the experience.
• Hire a layout designer: machines cannot replace art: free tools and templates will “do the job”, but they won’t differentiate your print book from thousands of others.
• Do your research: whether you’re going DIY or working with designers, look at bestselling books in your category. Purchase the print editions, see how they are designed and formatted. Compare their covers and look for recurring themes or elements. Trusting your designer’s instincts always comes first, but knowing what works out there is vital to steer them in the right direction

And again, don’t underestimate the power of good design. Just because you don’t “see” it doesn’t mean it’s not changing the way readers will read your book.

I should say right from the start that the ebook revolution has been wonderful for me as an author. I’ve made more money out of my self-published ebooks than any of my twenty-plus children’s books that have been conventionally published, have enjoyed the process enormously and gained a new, and entirely unexpected, audience. And yet despite this modest success, I’ll be looking for an agent and a traditional publisher for my next book.

Ten years ago, I had the idea for a trilogy of stories aimed at young teens, set in a large English country house through three generations and featuring the servants who lived and worked there. My first heroine would be a fifteen-year-old housemaid in 1890 (country house parties, Edwardian decadence, shadow of the workhouse); her daughter a reluctant kitchen maid in 1914 (male servants leaving for war, the house becoming a hospital, women taking on men’s work); her granddaughter would arrive at the house in the spring of 1939 (impending war, the house on hard times, Jewish children fleeing Germany). And so the ‘Swallowcliffe Hall‘ series was born, before Downton Abbey was even a twinkle in Julian Fellowes’ eye. An editor signed me up on the strength of three synopses and a few chapters and everyone seemed filled with enthusiasm. I wrote the three books over the next three years, but by the time the second had been published, it was obvious they weren’t going to be bestsellers. My editor went on maternity leave, the covers were dreary, there were hardly any foreign rights deals, reviews or promotions from the bookshop chains. Even my bookmarks had typos.

When Downton Abbey became such a success a few years later, I suggested reissuing the books with more enticing covers, but the proposal was vetoed by the publishers because ‘children don’t watch Downton’. I knew, though, that I would spontaneously combust if I had to watch another episode without doing something for my poor languishing stories. So I got the rights back, because hardly any copies had been sold over the last few royalty periods, and set about turning them into ebooks. This was in 2011 and my publishers seemed unaware of the potential of digital rights; they hadn’t previously released the stories in ebook format and had no plans to do so in the future. To be fair, children aren’t such great consumers of ebooks, and the trend for adults reading YA fiction hadn’t reached its peak.

My first formatting steps were tentative but, encouraged by guidance and enthusiasm from fellow children’s authors (thank you, Sue Price and Katherine Roberts), I persevered. The timing was perfect: suddenly there were thousands of readers, particularly in America, all desperate for English nostalgia; thanks to Kindle, I could reach them. Michael Boxwell’s ‘Make an Ebook‘ explained the mysteries of metatags, so I shamelessly added Downton Abbey tags wherever I could.

I had no idea what to expect, but sales of the ebooks began to build, helped by a well-timed paid promotion through Kindle Nation Daily. Several factors were on my side, although I didn’t fully realise that at the time. My books had already gone through the editing process, and the original printed versions (under different titles) had attracted reviews on Amazon which I was able to link to the ebook versions. I’d worked as an editor in children’s publishing myself, so had some experience of commissioning covers and an idea of the importance of marketing. My stories were ready to go – they just had to be formatted. Although they had first been published for children, they were carefully researched and historically accurate, and adult readers seem to love them too. Ebooks aren’t limited to a particular shelf in a bookshop; they can be enjoyed by anyone who comes across them and likes the look of the free sample. An author no longer has to worry whether bookshops will be – understandably – reluctant to take subsequent titles in a series if the first has been slow to sell.

To date, I’ve sold over 40,000 copies across the series, roughly two books in the US to every one in the UK. I have readers from Alabama to Alaska and, although the Downton Abbey effect has probably peaked, I’m still getting new reviews and daily sales. One woman said these were the books she’d enjoyed most on her Kindle so far. She gave me five stars! And Wuthering Heights one! (OK, that is a bit odd, but I’m not complaining.) I’ve been able to control pricing and check sales on a daily basis. Because I receive 70% of the cover price, I’ve been able to keep it low and still earn twice as much as I did from my print book royalties. Equally important, self-publishing made me feel like an author again. I wrote and released another story in the series, aimed less specifically at children – ‘Eugenie’s Story‘, told from the ‘upstairs’ side of the house – and a teen ghost romance. And yet…

It can be lonely, thrashing about in the self-publishing pool. I realised that ‘Eugenie’s Story’ was different from the other Swallowcliffe Hall books: less straightforward, with a comically unreliable narrator. I seemed to be heading in a new direction and wasn’t sure whether to continue. And if I carried on self-publishing, who was to say whether my books were any good or not? By the time sales declined, I might be too far off course. So I trod water for a while, beginning and abandoning a Bridget-Jones-hits-the-menopause type comic novel, before surrendering to a need for structure and advice. I’ve just finished the first draft of a novel for adults, written for a Creative Writing MA at City University under the guidance of tutors and external markers. I’m not going to self-publish it because I want someone to help make the book as good as it can be, telling me to keep working at this aspect or that, and telling me finally when to stop tinkering: a disinterested arbiter who also knows the publishing world and can offer me impartial advice. And when the novel’s ready, I don’t want to be the only one announcing my brilliance to the world. It feels better when someone else has a hand on the marketing tiller.

I love the control that self-publishing brings: being able to check sales figures daily, to adjust prices instantly and see the effect that has on sales. And I love my beautiful and personal new covers, with a photograph of my great-uncle Norman featured on ‘Grace’s Story‘ and my mother on ‘Isobel’s‘. Self publishing has given a new lease of life to a series that would otherwise have sunk without trace. For my next project, though, it’s time to call in the professionals. I want someone else to judge whether my writing makes the grade before it goes out into the world – just because you can self-publish, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should.

Like many writers who have been around the block a few times, my backlist was spread across a number of publishers and territories, including the UK, USA, and Canada. In 2013 my Canadian publisher ‘ceased to trade’ and my agent and I took this as an opportunity to pull my backlist rights back to where they belonged – with me. I decided to create ebook editions of four of my backlist novels, Where Does Kissing End?, The Last Time I Saw Jane, Weird Sister, and A Little Stranger, and to time this re-launch of my backlist with the trade publication of my new novel, Landing Gear in the spring 2014. My 2009 novel The Mistress of Nothing remains in print and e-book with traditional publishers across a dozen territories.

I worked on this project with Joanna Ellis of The Literary Platform; to be sure, I would not have been able to get this off the ground without Jo’s help. Despite what you might read elsewhere, self-publishing is not easy. It’s time-consuming and it can be costly. Several months into the process, it became clear that while my new novel, Landing Gear, was coming out with Doubleday, Penguin Random House in Canada and Touchstone Books, Simon & Schuster in the USA, it was not going to secure a UK publisher. So we decided to add a UK-only e-book edition of Landing Gear into our publishing programme by buying the e-book file and cover design from Doubleday.

We learned a few things in the process which we thought we would share.

1. Expect to spend more than you are expecting to

I was working with four novels that had already been published, so there were no costs around editing, copy-editing, and proof-reading, all of which can be expensive. If you want to produce ebooks that are a pleasure to read and resemble those that a large publisher would create, attention to detail is key.

2. Update and save, save, SAVE!

Make sure to update your writing documents and files regularly, and store latest/ final versions in more than one place. I had print copies of the four backlist titles, but no digital files for three of them, despite having been written on computers – perhaps not all that surprising given that one of the books, Where Does Kissing End?, was first published twenty-one years ago in 1993. If you’re in the same boat, getting books re-keyed to create digital files will be an additional cost.

3. Go broad…

It’s easy to think that it’s all about Amazon, and don’t get me wrong, Kindle accounts for a significant proportion of sales of my books both in the UK and internationally, but we were pleasantly surprised by the sales through other channels, especially the library sectors in the UK and North America.

Our strategy was simply to not cut off any sales avenue open to us. The ebook retail ecosystem is more diversified in territories outside the UK and, despite what anyone might proclaim, no one really knows how it will shakedown in the next few years.

We did identify and prioritise the retailers who offered the best opportunities for my books. As a Canadian, with Canadian and US deals for my new book, we wanted to harness the interest in my new book in these territories to direct readers to my backlist. Practically this meant prioritising Kobo, a significant player in Canada and supplier of ebooks to Canada’s biggest book retailer Chapters Indigo; iBooks, the second biggest ebook retailer in the US; and Nook, suppliers of ebooks to Barnes and Noble; alongside Amazon.

4 … and go direct where you can

Our advice is to go direct with as many retailers as you can feasibly handle in order to maximise your margins and retain flexibility and control over metadata and pricing. But, as well as that, use a distributor to help with access to retailers and aggregators who don’t deal directly with individual authors, and for platforms where the process is, frankly, finicky.

We used a distributor for iBooks (Apple’s terms and conditions are labyrinthine), Overdrive (who distribute to Waterstones.com and libraries in US, Canada and the UK but don’t deal directly with individual authors) and, as of the end of 2014, subscription services Oyster and Bookmate. In retrospect we should have used them for Google Play too – the publishing process on this platform is far from painless.

Most distributors charge a per title/ per year fee, a cut of sales or some combination of the two. We went with Ebook Partnership who supply a large list of retailers and aggregators and who have been very supportive and helpful. They are also reasonably priced, the only downside being that they charge to change metadata and prices. Retailers Ts & Cs require you to supply the same price to every retailer, so if you change the price of your books with the retailers you supply directly, you have to change them with your distributor, which for us means paying a fee every time we experiment with pricing.

We also went for a direct sales platform on my own website. I decided to do this as it seems to me a logical extension of the idea of having control over my backlist – why not sell the books directly to readers via my website as well as via the retailers? This entailed yet more expense: we used Digital Product Delivery, which is a neat, cost effective solution for selling ebooks online, the main outlay was paying my web developer to integrate the shopping cart into my existing website.

I began to doubt how worthwhile selling direct would be for me soon after it was all set up. Sales from my website have almost entirely been to people I know who were buying directly because they a) knew me and b) wanted me to get a larger cut of the sale price (thank you!). Building and maintaining a network of readers who are loyal enough to buy directly from you is hard and time-consuming work, especially if, like me, your books are very different from one another, and therefore your readers are likely to be too.

If I was already having doubts about selling directly then the new VAT regulations on e-services (which includes online ebook sales) have confirmed them. I won’t go into detail, for that I refer you to Suw Charman-Anderson’s excellent, sweary post, but suffice to say these new regulations place an additional administrative and financial burden on individuals and small businesses selling ebooks. The upshot is I’ve called a hiatus on my short-lived online shop. This isn’t to say it won’t worthwhile for you, just that in retrospect it shoudn’t have been a priority for me, and my advice would be to consider carefully whether you have the time (and patience) to do it justice before you fork out your cash.

5. Play with price

Which brings us to pricing. We took what many indie authors would consider a conservative approach to pricing, with backlist titles at £3.99 for the most part, and the UK ebook edition of my new novel at £5.99. While these prices are high in the current ebook market, I sometimes wince at how low they are when compared to buying print books in bricks and mortar bookshops. But we have remained flexible with pricing, experimenting with lowering the price of different titles at different times. For example we lowered the price of my new novel to coincide with Canada Day and Summer Reading season, and we lowered the price of my gothic novel, Weird Sister to coincide with Hallowe’en.

In my case there has been little evidence to show that lower prices drive an uplift in sales. However many indie writers are also genre writers, publishing Romance, Mystery, Crime and Science Fiction/Fantasy, and price might be more of a draw for readers of those genres. Literary Fiction does not have a great sales record in the world of self-publishing, in fact literary fiction suffers in the online retail environment because the descriptors – keywords and tags – that are used for searching for books online are much more difficult to figure out for literary or general fiction than they are for, say, a ‘teenage vampire love story’.

6. Have a plan, keep active and don’t forget the old levers

We don’t mean stay fit, though that’s a good idea too. For Jo and I, activity seemed to be more effective in driving sales than price: we ran a pre-publication give-away of my new novel on GoodReads, a Hallowe’en give-away of my literary horror novel Where Does Kissing End? on Noisetrade, and a Facebook advertising campaign for Landing Gear – which has a gloriously sunny cover – over the summer, and I wrote blog posts and did interviews and sent newsletters to my email subscribers.

With the UK-only ebook edition of Landing Gear we were lucky enough to get reviews in Stylist and Red as well as a substantial review and podcast interview in the Guardian. We did not attempt to get reviews for the new editions of the backlist; all of the (modest) publicity budget went on Landing Gear, and the effectiveness of established media outlets was borne out with spikes in sales.

On a practical note, we found an activity calendar really helped to keep us focused and tie-in with other relevant events, and to ensure a good spread of activity throughout the year. We created a simple excel grid detailing month, events (e.g. Summer Reading, Black History Month, Hallowe’en, Cybermonday, Christmas etc.), focus title, price drops, promotions and PR.

7. Expect things to change, fast

Don’t become too reliant on any one outlet or tool and try to keep abreast of any major developments (especially the legal ones!). For instance, Vook established a fantastic author portal that enabled authors to draw all their sales data into a single user-friendly dashboard. Due to factors beyond Vook’s control, this dashboard stopped working and was pulled. Retailers change their terms and conditions; for example, we didn’t participate in Amazon’s Kindle Select programme, but if we had, the books would have been added to their subscription programme without our direct consent. Then there were the changes to the VAT regulations on ebook services which came into force in January 2015, which meant we had to rethink direct sales. Keeping abreast of it all can be a challenge, keep a close eye on notifications from the platforms you are using and check the Alliance of Independent Authors and The Bookseller sites regularly, they will cover any major  news affecting independent authors.

8. Get friendly with Excel

As an independent author you have access to more granular sales data in a more timely fashion than do most publishers. This is fantastic as it enables you to identify which of your activity is most effective and do more of it!  However pulling that sales data together so you get a handle on which titles are selling through which platforms in which territories is a laborious affair which involves downloading sales data from individual platforms plus your distributor, if you’re using one. We would strongly recommend setting a regular schedule for downloading and saving your sales data for safekeeping as it becomes unavailable from some platforms after 2-3 months.

9. Print still reigns in some settings

We’d always planned for the backlist editions to be digital-only and haven’t spent any time at all investigating print options. However, with Landing Gear in the UK, it soon became clear that not having a print edition can put you at a disadvantage: mainstream press and many bloggers want reading copies in print, you can’t offer ebooks in a Goodreads give-away and at readings and festivals print copies remain the only way to proceed. We were lucky enough to be able to use US and Canadian hardcover print editions to send out,  if reviews, Good Reads, and readings/ festivals figure prominently in your promotional plan it might be worth exploring the print options available to you. One thing I found useful on my Canadian tour for Landing Gear was having a bookmark that featured my backlist titles which I slipped into print copies of my novel at signings to serve as a reminder to readers once they got home.

When Doubleday brings out their paperback of Landing Gear in 2015, I’ll give them the right to distribute in the UK; I don’t expect this to mean it will be displayed in shops but, at the very least, UK readers will be able to buy the print edition online.

10. And finally… be in it for the long run

While sales have spiked around activity, even during quiet periods the books still sell. Although it will take some time to pay off my investment in the backlist, I feel a good deal of satisfaction in the knowledge that these four backlist titles are available to readers once again, and hopefully for good this time.

You can read about the digital genesis of Kate’s novel, Landing Gear, in this article.

‘Anyway, those tickets, the old ones, they didn’t tell you where you were going, much less where you came from. He couldn’t remember seeing any dates on them either, and there was certainly no mention of time. It was all different now, of course. All this information. Archie wondered why this was’. — White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000) 

In spite of the above quote, 2000 may well now appear to have been a golden age in terms of information. In those long gone halcyon days, none of us had to worry about terms like big data, discoverability, feeds, and, quite possibly the scariest of them all, metadata.

All of us are awash with information now, drowning in an ever expanding sea of data. But it’s worth remembering that one school of thought, Clay Shirky’s, holds that there’s no such thing as information overload, only filter failure.

Let’s focus on metadata: What is it? Why are people always talking about it? And what’s it got to do with me anyway?

Definitions are never easy. But actually, in this case, it is. Metadata is simply information that describes your book, things like the ISBN, the price, the title, the author, the publication date, the description, the format, etc.

These things can be about identification (ISBN), they can be bibliographic (author, title, format) or transactional (price). What they have in common is that they’re all pieces of information that describe your book. And that’s it.

A key thing to remember is that metadata isn’t new. We’ve always needed this sort of information (think Advance Information sheets, the humble forerunner of the data feed) and we’ve always had people who care about it (the even humbler Information Manager).

But why do I hear so much about it now?  

To help answer this, let’s pause for a moment to think about iTunes. Here’s an iTunes library below. (It isn’t mine by the way, before you silently condemn my taste in music).

We’ve all seen this before and it’s familiar. But what are we actually seeing? Well, we can see information about artist, song title, album, genre, length of song, etc. You can probably see where I’m going with this: we’re looking at information that describes this collection of music. We’re looking at metadata.

And as we know from using iTunes, it’s incredibly useful. It allows you to group together genres, find favourite songs, create playlists, sort, filter, remove. The list goes on. So imagine your iTunes library without any metadata. You wouldn’t be able to do any of those things. In fact, your library would be pretty much unusable.

Let’s carry that analogy over to books. Imagine walking into a large bookshop and finding that all the book covers on all the shelves were blank and none of the shelves were marked.

If you had a book that was among all this, how would you possibly find it? The simple answer is, you wouldn’t. And neither would anyone else.

Now take that bookshop, and imagine it to be 1000 times bigger with 1000 times more books. And imagine it to be open to practically anybody in any country in the world at any time.

That’s the internet. And the miniscule needle in this gargantuan haystack is your book.

Without good metadata, you’re effectively putting your book with a blank cover up against hundreds if not thousands of competing titles in the biggest bookshop you can imagine. In 2000, when high streets bookshops were plentiful and ebooks a distant glimmer, metadata was important. Now, in the online environment, it’s life or death.

This is a good time to bring in another one of those scary words. Discoverability. Many publishers spend huge amounts of money and commit vast resources on complex methods of boosting discoverability for their titles.

This isn’t necessarily misguided, but having good metadata is the first step towards discoverability, which is ensuring that your book can be easily found online. It’s a step a surprising number of people skip. Making sure your metadata is in order is quick, easy and incredibly effective in terms of helping your book reach its intended audience.

So how do you do that? What is ‘good’ metadata?

A really good place to start is Book Industry Commission, the book industry’s supply chain organisation. They have developed a standard called BIC Basic which outlines the minimum metadata requirements for a title.

The information you need to supply to Nielsen, ideally four months ahead of publication, is shown in the example below. If you are self publishing you will also need to supply the information to your distributor and if you are publishing directly with platforms such as Amazon KDP or Kobo Writing Life, you will need to enter it onto their systems too (they provide step by step guides).

Title: Azar’s Brilliant First Novel

ISBN: 9780000000000

Product Form: Hardback

BIC Code: FA (Modern Fiction)

Publisher: Azar Classics

Imprint: Debut Dazzlers

Publication Date: 26th March 2015 (This might slip)

Supplier: Wonderful Warehousing

Availability Status: Not Yet Published

Price: £9.99

Territorial Rights: World

Description Copy: A day in the life of a beleaguered information manager, the digital Ulysses for the 21st century.

There are other things you can do, but the above is the bare minimum. If it’s the one thing you remember from this article, you won’t have wasted your time. Supplying the book jacket in good time is also highly advisable. We do all judge books by their covers and a blank placeholder will impress no one.

Many people think metadata ends there. You send it out  pre-publication and the job’s done. But metadata should be thought of as evolving and it often needs revision. For example:

Have you sold US rights? Don’t forget to change your Territorial Rights statement so retailers in the US know they should stop selling your edition. Forget to do it, and you could have a lawsuit on your hands.

Has publication date slipped? Make sure you update your metadata. Unless you want to confuse your would-be readers by making them wonder why they can’t have your book when you said they could.

Have you won a prize? Been shortlisted? Add it to your description copy. It all helps.

Want to experiment with pricing? Have you got a promotion on? Make sure the right price is visible at the right time (and in the right place).

The above examples all lead to a final point which is equally important:

There’s only one thing worse than having no metadata, and that’s having incorrect metadata.

Sending out the wrong price is the equivalent of having your reader pick up a book for £7.99 in a shop only to be told at the till it’s actually £12.99. Or telling your reader that their book will be in tomorrow only for them to return and you to say it actually won’t be in for another two weeks.

If you’re in any doubt about any of your metadata, you’re actually better off making no statement. Because as a number of celebrities, politicians and users of social media have discovered, once you’ve released information online, you can’t claw it back.

Metadata is the lifeblood of your title. And all you have to do is make sure you cover the elements of BIC Basic as above and maintain them as necessary. I hope the above has convinced you that metadata is vital to the success of your book, but if you ever need a reminder, just look at this:

Some useful links:

An Introduction to ONIX – The industry standard for communicating metadata

BIC Basic – The minimum requirement for your metadata

BIC Codes – Find the right BIC subject code for your title

Book Industry Communication – The book industry’s supply chain organisation

Book Industry Study Group – BIC’s US counterpart

The book publishing industry is going through a huge transition. It’s easier than ever to get a book out into the world. All the resources you need to publish a book are available you and you no longer need to go through the traditional gatekeepers (publishers) to publish a quality book.

Because it’s so easy to publish a book and get it out to market, authors sometimes skip critical steps. Below are some of the most common mistakes I’ve seen.

1) Having Vague Goals

You need to define your goals. Are you looking to get more readers? Or looking to sell books? It’s easy to get more readers if you’re a first-time author, but it’s harder to sell books.

2) Not Getting Your Work Professionally Edited

Once you’ve written your book, an editor is important. If your book needs a lot of work a developmental editor will evaluate and critique your manuscript, suggest and provide revisions and shape it into a smooth, workable piece. Next you might want to get a copy editor to catch any typos. Not getting your work professionally edited is like not testing a drug before it goes out into market.

3) Not Hiring A Professional Cover Designer

People judge a book by a cover. They will judge how it looks on a black and white Kindle and how it looks on Smartphones. It’s important that your cover design catch the reader at first sight. Before you hire a designer check out the designer’s portfolio to make sure your vision and your designer’s vision are the same.

4) Not Doing Your Research On Vendors Or Vanity Presses

I’ve come across way too many authors who have spent tens of thousands of dollars on vanity presses who prey on authors. A vanity press is a publishing house in which authors pay to have their books published (Author House, Balboa Press, etc). Before you choose a vendor or press make sure you Google “[Name of Press/Vendor] Reviews.” That will tell you what you need to know about the press or vendor before you sign up.

5) Not Proofreading Your Book

Once you have the final digital or print version of your book, you should give it a thorough read to make sure it’s free of errors. Vendors do make mistakes. At this stage, you won’t catch too many errors, but you do want to catch them pre-publication.

6) Pre-printing Books Without A Distribution Deal

I had an author come to me who spent most of his money on print runs for his poorly designed and poorly edited book. Currently, he has 1000 copies of his book sitting in his garage. Unless you have already found someone to distribute your books for you, you might want to opt for a print-on-demand service like Createspace or Lightning Source where the book is printed and sent to the reader when they buy it.

7) Lack Of A Marketing Plan

It’s essential to having a marketing plan around your book. Books don’t just sell themselves. This is probably where you’ll spend most of your time and a good chunk of your money.

As an indie or self-published author it’s really important to do your research before making any vendor, retail, or editorial services decisions. It’s a lot of work, but thinking through all the pieces will prevent you from wasting money, time and effort.

A version of this article was originally published here, at SelfPublishedAuthor.com, a Bowker website offering tools and advice to self-published authors. Bowker is the official ISBN agency in the US.

I was stuck in a rut. My blogging was sluggish and I’d been working on a novel for two years with no end in sight. I was moaning to my brother over Skype about the slow path my career was taking, when he said: “So write a novel on Wattpad.” He told me his girlfriend was reading a book on the online platform which had racked up millions of hits and the author had just secured a three book deal with a big publisher. According to him, Wattpad was the way forward.

Feeling a little overwhelmed and knowing full well a free online platform would not pay me a penny for a novel, I began my investigation. I found an easy to use site where anyone could upload their writing, posting as many or few chapters of their books whenever they wanted to. The uploaded novels were indexed within a range of genres; this included a ‘Featured’ section of work selected by Wattpad organisers. The featured novels were evidently benefiting hugely from the exposure, with the top ones attracting millions of hits and thousands of votes and comments.

At first I wasn’t sure if Wattpad was the place for me since a lot of the stories appeared to be written by and for teen ‘beleibers’ and ‘directioners’, which I’m definitely not! Writing a novel is hardly a five minute job and I didn’t want to risk it if the audience wasn’t right. Despite my reservations I signed up and added information in my profile about my past publications and social networks. Next I posted a couple of short stories to test the water.

The short stories didn’t get a million hits, they got a couple of hundred. What they did do however is catch the attention of someone who worked at Wattpad who emailed me with a question. ‘Seeing as you’re a published author,’ they said, ‘would you like to put some of your work on Wattpad in exchange for some marketing benefit?’ They attached a tantalising pdf telling me of their 8 million monthly readers and assured me that if I wrote a novel on their site it would be included in their featured section and be actively recommended to their readers.

Once I’d made the decision to do it, the idea for my romantic comedy, Spray Painted Bananas, came quickly. I wanted to write something light hearted. I plotted for a month, and wrote a ten thousand word buffer before I started posting chapters. Initially one a week, then two.

The votes and comments came flooding in immediately. I’d never experienced anything like it on that scale before. Each day I woke to messages of encouragement from impatient readers wanting to know WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?! There were times when I didn’t even know the answer to that, but with such a responsive audience I found myself writing faster and harder than I had ever done before. The best bit was realising how much I loved writing in the romantic comedy genre. I knew there was no turning back. I didn’t want to be a tortured writer any more, from now on I wanted to have a laugh with my novels!

Spray Painted Bananas took four months to write. When it had reached half a million hits and with four chapters still left to post, I contacted an agent. They signed me up a few weeks later.

My novel is still online and free to read but I’ve edited it for publishers. It’s been sent out and I’m waiting. Will it a find publisher? I really hope so. But even if it doesn’t and I don’t make a penny from Spay Painted Bananas, I’m so happy I took on the Wattpad challenge.

5 Top Tips for Writers on Wattpad

– Choose a genre –

Wattpad is the ideal platform for writers of YA fiction, trilogies, series and work that will fit comfortably into their genre categories. You don’t have to post a whole series of books on Wattpad, but if readers like the first book you post, they are more likely to buy the second from a paying platform.

– Ask to be featured –

If you have had work published then contact Wattpad and ask if they will feature your novel. If you don’t ask, you don’t get! You will need a good pitch and a professional looking book cover.

– Post regularly –

Make the experience enjoyable for your readers by posting every week. What motivated me is imagining if I had to wait a month in between every chapter of a book. I know I’d have given up reading very quickly!

– Be friendly –

Thank people for their comments and votes. If you are using Wattpad to get constructive feedback on a work-in-progress, then it’s only fair to give some feedback too. But don’t feel under pressure to read every book readers ask you to or you’ll soon feel swamped.

– Link to social media –

Wattpad users tend to stay in Wattpad and rarely migrate to follow you on other social networks. Despite racking up over a million hits on my novel, less than a hundred readers joined my Twitter and Facebook. That said, I really value those eighty who did and I know they are the ones who will be interested in buying my future books. Add your social networks links in your Wattpad profile to facilitate readers finding you on them.

Self-publishing has transformed the publishing landscape forever. Kobo Writing Life is one of the platforms available to writers wishing to publish and disseminate their work. We caught up with Diego Marano, UK Manager of Kobo Writing Life, about how the platform works with writers as well as the opportunities and challenges writer’s face today.

What is Kobo Writing Life? What differentiates it from other self-publishing platforms?

Kobo Writing Life is Kobo’s self-publishing platform which launched in the summer of 2012.  A year later Kobo Writing Life has enabled authors to publish in over 60 languages, across more than 140 countries and has grown to the point where it constitutes  between 10 and 18% of Kobo’s unit sales every week.

KWL users are able  to directly upload their e-books to the Kobo global platform. This enables them to enter multiple markets, significantly increasing the visibility of their works and the chances of gaining new readers. The KWL platform has been localized and supports  the following languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Dutch.

Kobo Writing Life distinguishes itself by being free, open and collaborative. Our author community is not tied to a closed and limiting environment.  Authors maintain all copyright in their works and are at liberty to upload, convert, edit and sell their books for no extra charge. The KWL interface is also particularly appreciated by authors for being intuitive and user-friendly.

And how does it support writers?

KWL removes the barriers for authors and gives independent authors the opportunity to find a global audience. For some authors this proves that there is a market for their books and convinces publishers to invest in their talent. An average of 5-8 titles in Kobo’s Top 50 chart at any given time are those published on KWL. KWL is continually being updated based on feedback from the writing community, and is always looking for new ways to refine, improve and add to the tools we make freely available to them.

What is your role at Kobo Writing Life?

I joined KWL in August of this year and I am in charge of the UK territory. My goal is to elevate the presence and the success of authors published at Kobo. The UK market is one of the most dynamic in terms of self-publishing and I am thrilled to work with the author community.

Are there genres that perform particularly well on Kobo?

Of course some genres are more popular (and profitable) than others. Romance and Thriller are two genres that do quite well. However, if you write a book with the main purpose of making money, it rarely  pays off. You write a book because you feel the need to. You have a world in your head and you want to share it with other people. Writing is a complex process and some elements are beyond  your control.

Michelangelo Buonarroti once said ‘Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it’. Likewise I believe that, as a writer, the story you feel the need to tell is already inside you. The best thing you can do is to discover it and bring it to light.

What do you perceive to be the main challenges and opportunities for writers at the current time?

The publishing business is in the middle of the most profound  revolution since the Gutenberg Bible. This change has been driven by the development of technology. This restless force affects all aspects  of the publishing process. It influences the way you format, distribute, promote and sell content. It has even come to influence the writing process. Comprehending this restless force and making the most of it is the key challenge and the greatest opportunity at the same time.

Through KWL writers can freely publish their e-book. As soon as an e-book gets released it hits  multiple markets across the globe and the writer gains 45% to 70% from the selling price they autonomously set. If your book doesn’t fly off the shelves at the first place you have plenty of time to perfect it, promote it and keep trying. The big challenge most writers struggle with is patience – authors should know that this is a long term thing. If it doesn’t sell now it might take off tomorrow, or the day after. If it doesn’t work in your country it might find a readership elsewhere across the globe. Becoming a successful writer is not guaranteed but no great opportunity comes without a challenge.

You also work with agents and publishers, how does that work?

Drawing a dividing line between self-publishing and the rest of the business is not just futile but counter-productive. Self-publishing an e-book is easy and economical. The ‘traditional’ production chain is more expensive and publishers are understandably very careful when it comes to investing in an author. Agents and small publishers are realizing that KWL is an easy and cheap way to give their authors the opportunity to prove themselves and experiment without the pressure that comes from significant initial investment.

What advice would you give to any writer embarking on the self-publishing journey?

The self-publishing journey is not only about writing and selling.  A fundamental part of this journey has to do with promoting your book and yourself. There are independent authors that sell without any form of self-promotion but they are extremely rare. This has to do with the mystique of our business and it is essentially inexplicable. In reality, the majority of successful independent authors devote a remarkable amount of time to promoting their works. They do that by engaging with their readership on regular basis, growing their platform of fans day by day. This takes time but can be extremely rewarding in many different ways.

What tips to you have for writers who want to increase sales of their e-books?

There is no  silver bullet. What leads an author to succeed cannot be outlined in a few tips. However, there is one word that each independent author should inscribe in their mind, and that word is ‘marketing’. I personally believe that any publishing journey has to begin with a terrific product but having a ‘sound’ marketing plan is vital.  You can have a beautifully crafted tall ship but if you don’t know how to set a course and catch the wind you are very likely to get stuck.

What’s next? For writers, for publishing, for Kobo Writing Life?

Kobo Writing Life is constantly under development. At Kobo we believe that our job is not only about aggregating and selling content but it is about providing an effective service capable of meeting users’ needs. With this in mind we designed a dashboard which provides each user with data on sales by country, along with estimated earnings.  We recently enabled pre-ordering for e-books so that authors  can set release dates and accumulate orders.

We have also improved our service by adding the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor which enables users to preview their books and make quick corrections and updates if needs be. Overall, we are continuously working on developments and upgrades. Our goal is to make the self-publishing journey really accessible and to show everybody the opportunity beyond the challenge.

Kobo Writing Life is supporting The Writing Platform’s fair and conference for writers on 4^th November.  Diego Marano, will be available throughout the day to answer questions and offer personal advice and he will also be running an open seminar on ‘The Self-Publishing Journey in the Digital Market’ at 12.15.

Kobo Writing Life is also offering two free tickets to the event, enter here and one lucky visitor to the event will take home a Kobo Aura (RRP £119).

CompletelyNovel.com is an online publishing community and social-sharing site for book-lovers which helps self-published writers to publish quality print editions at competitive prices.

We spoke to Anna Lewis, co-founder of Completely Novel, about why print is still important in the digital age.

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Are print books still relevant for independent authors?

With eBook sales on the rise and Kindle eBooks surpassing the sale of print books on Amazon last year, more people are asking – is print still relevant in this increasingly digital age? The answer from our point of view, and the point of view of our hundreds of writers who choose to publish through our platform in print, is a definite ‘yes!’.

 So, why are printed books still relevant? We outline just a few of the reasons below.

To have and to hold

Yes, we thought we’d start with the most basic reason: that with all the technology in the world, there are still many of us who love the feel, texture and smell of a physical book. We like going into a bookshop and running our fingers along the spines of the books until we find the one for us; we like showing them off on our bookshelves; we like to feel the pages lessen in our right hand as we near the end of the story. There is something exciting about books that made us all fall in love with them in the first place – and that’s something the typical eBook can’t quite replicate.

To give and receive

 The technology for sharing or gifting ebooks has been slow to develop and is still not very advanced – some have even said that it’s little more than glorified file-sharing. Wrapping a book to give to your family or a friend feels better than sending an email with a voucher code on it – it’s more tangible and immediate.

A book launch or signing also requires a physical product, and while there are some programs to allow for digital autographs, there is still something important to us about having an author sign a physical book.

Print books in a digital word

There are those who argue that print books cannot survive in an increasingly digital world. There is no denying that the way we access storytelling has changed in recent years – we now download films and music, and can watch performances over the web or our television. However, the printing of books has also become increasingly digitalised, meaning that traditional and self-publishers can now print-on-demand and save thousands of books from being printed unnecessarily. New technology has also altered the production of books – making them easier to design, and allowing editors and designers to be more creative with typesetting and packaging. Rather than hindering print, technology has helped books evolve and inspire a new generation to read.

What writers think

We are a publisher dealing mainly in print, so we’re obviously going to have lots of good things to say about the paperback. So, why don’t we hand over to some of our writers, to find out why they opted for publishing physical books.

Tom Evans

For entrepreneurs, having a published book in your name can help hugely in establishing your credibility, differentiating you from your competitors and attracting clients. Using print can be particularly attractive as you have more freedom and control when it comes to using images, graphs and tables in your book, which might get mangled by the reflowable format of eBooks.

Tom Evans is a life coach and works with a large number of clients helping them to find direction and inspiration in their careers and personal lives. Handing one of his books such as In The Zone to clients is a useful way of letting them digest the practices and principles in their own time. Print on demand means he can do that as efficiently as possible.

“Even though everyone seems to be using eReaders these days, print books have a place in this new world. At my talks and workshops, people still love having personally signed copies my books. If I am doing a talk for 23 people, I know that I can order exactly 23 books at no cost penalty and they will be delivered within 5 days, sometimes in two!”

Christian Paris

Christian Paris penned ‘A Pretty Smart Way To Catch A Lobster (The Alice In Wonderland Years)’ to tell the story of how he was inspired to start a club and the many adventures he had in the ten years that the club ran for. There’s a large group of people who remember the club and may also have been part of the various weird and wonderful projects that Christian ran alongside it. Having a printed book was a way of saving and sharing those memories with that group of people.

“To me a book has to be held, to be touched, to turn over, to read the blurb on the back and to take a sneaky look at the pictures inside, before settling down and reading it. Once read it can be lent to others and then to be treasured.”

Andrew Sykes

‘Crossing Europe on a Bike Called Reggie’ was written by Andrew Sykes, a keen cyclist. It has been a highly successful book among other travellers and cyclists, both in terms of eBook sales and print sales. Here’s why he opted for print:

“Selling eBooks is great but to actually see your literary effort in a printed book is something quite special. Apart from that initial wish, it obviously opens up the books to more traditional markets and has allowed me to get the books into around 100 Waterstone’s stores nationwide as well as being sold through online channels such as Amazon. Many people prefer (for very good reasons) having a book in their hand to hold, to bend, to lay down on the floor, to put on their coffee table, to throw at the cat! You can’t really do that with an eBook.”

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So there you have it. If you want your readers to get more from your book than just the text (such as a means of animal control or memento to treasure), print offers plenty that keeps it relevant, and interesting – for publishers and independent authors alike.

The self-publishing process has become pretty well established by now, a received wisdom that shapes every entrepreneurial writer’s secret dreams:

1. Write book

2. ???

3. Profit!

Amazon is the secret sauce that many self-publishers rely on to propel them to the authorial stratosphere, hoping that they will become the next breakout bestseller. But for the other 99.9% of us for whom the lightning doesn’t strike, Amazon turns out to be a double-edged sword. Whilst it gives you access to vast numbers of readers, it cuts you off from them too, divorcing you from your fanbase in a singularly unhelpful way.

Amazon provides its suppliers, whether self-publishers or traditional publishers, with no more than basic sales data. This makes it very difficult to explicitly tie marketing activities to sales, which in turn makes it hard to know whether a specific campaign has been successful. If you want to know which other websites or links sent readers your way, Amazon won’t tell you. If you’d like to know which country they come from, Amazon won’t tell you that either. And if you want to hook your email newsletter sign-up procedure into your point of sale, well, Amazon says no. Using a direct sales platform, however, gives you all this and more.

There are many hosted direct sales solutions that allow you to sell both digital and physical goods, although it’s probably easier to start off selling just ebooks. I have focused on the most common formats such as epub and mobi, and only provide a pdf when I have properly typeset a book. My ebook shop is hosted on DPD, but there’s also E-Junkie and many others. When choosing a direct sales platform you should look for one that will either give you detailed traffic statistics or allow you to hook your ebook shop into third party analytics services such as Statcounter or Google Analytics. This will allow you to find out where your buyers come from, which will help you with your marketing. If a lot of your buyers come from America, for example, when most of your Twitter followers and blog readers come from the UK, that might indicate that you should more often tweet late in the British night, perhaps scheduling your tweets, to develop your readership in the States.

You should also be able to connect your shop to your mailing list software. I have a monthly newsletter which I run through Mailchimp, and everyone who purchases something from my ebook shop is given the opportunity to sign up to it. When I released a short story through my store in April, sign-ups to my newsletter jumped. When I released my latest novella, Queen of the May, two weeks ago, I saw another surge in sign-ups, far more than when I was relying on just the sign-up form on my site and a link in my ebooks.

Most online shops also allow you to create discount codes. Every person who signs up to my newsletter, for example, gets a code that allows them to download a previous novella and short story for free, and another code that gives them Queen of the May for 99p, a £1.50 discount. I can use these codes to run marketing experiments, or I can create a unique discount code and seed it on social media to see how effective it is. For example, I can have different codes that I release on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and Linked in, and then I can see which one produces more sales. That gives me insight into which platform is most effective at reaching my book buyers.

Selling direct doesn’t mean that you have to leave Amazon or other outlets — you can just as easily run your ebook shop in parallel to your other sales channels. I chose to keep Queen of the May off Amazon so that my experiment would be as complete as possible, with every buyer going through my shop. By only selling direct, the actual relationship between marketing activity and sales is illuminated through discount codes and traffic referral data. In a way, this novella is a sacrificial lamb, but the data it’s already giving me is well worth any lost sales.

I’m sure I’ll go back to Amazon again at some point in the future because it really does give you access to readers on a scale that is hard to achieve on your own. But in the meantime, I am learning more about what actually works for me, for my books and for my readers than I ever could from Amazon. When you self-publish, you are your only resource, so you have to use your time carefully. By investing some time in setting up your direct sales platforms and hooking it up to your newsletter and web analytics tools, you can save a lot of time in the long run through focusing only on activities you know, empirically, will work for you.

Photo © Alexandra a Noz