I’m sure Chuck Wendig can be blamed for a lot of things, particularly my flash fiction. Ok, I’ll take responsibility for that myself, but he sets the challenges each week. No, this time it was his excellent blog on being an indie author, or a self-published author. Or, rather, a published author who happens to be the publisher too.
These ideas are right up there at the start of his post 25 Steps to Becoming a Self-Published Author. If you click the link, be warned that Chuck labels his blog NSFW – which as I understand it means Not Suitable for Work. It has language, and occasionally concepts, that are not suitable for Middle Grade readers, that’s for sure. But the sense he talks keeps me going back for more.
I hope he doesn’t mind me quoting his point 3:
Adjust Your Mindset, Part II: You’re The Publisher, Now
You’re not just an author. You’re not just a “self”-publisher. You’re a publisher from bottom to top, from feet to forehead, from ******* to eyebrows. Being a publisher means being a business. A small business of one. I’m not saying to go get an MBA, but you need to start thinking at least a little bit what it means to go beyond being a writer to become a micro-publisher. Start wrapping your head around marketing and advertising, distribution, budgets, taxes, and so forth. A traditional publisher ideally brings things to the table to help the author’s book succeed; how are you going to help your own book succeed? You’re the publisher. The responsibility is yours. But so is the fancy chair. You did go buy a fancy chair, right? No? Rookie.
I gave this some more thought over the last few days, and did a little self-assessment on it. If you’re a regular reader you’ll know that I have at least an apology for a marketing plan, that I did eventually sort out my US tax situation, and that I am trying to be professional about it. With new ideas for further stories, not necessarily involving the Princelings, there’s a possibility I might even have a range of products under the publisher name I gave myself at the start, Princelings Publications. How would I handle those, I thought.
The result of my deliberations was to develop a new website just for the publisher in me.
The website launched on Friday. Quietly, as I’m working on it. It’s for book promotions and news. So I slipped in the very attractive Best of Summer hop details with about 10 hours left, and another post goes live soon after this one. The sneaky thing about it is that I’ve utilised my blogger profile to set it up on blogspot, which means that it will have all those nice javascript widgets (technical term, don’t worry) that don’t show up on this blog (for technical reasons).
I like the result. I hope you do too. At present it has the ordinary blogger address – PrincelingsPublications.blogspot.com It’s linked from here if you click on the logo near the top left. I’ll decide later whether to get a domain name that drops the blogspot bit. I’ll let you know if I do!
But of course, all the interesting stuff, work in progress, flash fiction, gossip, book reviews will be here. What I have to work out is how the Official Princelings Website differs in content. My rule of thumb is that one is business and the others are “pleasure” or at least fun for the reader. One is the publisher, one is the Princelings books, and this one is the author. Something like that anyway. Maybe it’s overkill. Let’s see.