{"id":1645,"date":"2018-05-23T09:00:38","date_gmt":"2018-05-23T13:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/?p=1645"},"modified":"2018-05-22T22:10:24","modified_gmt":"2018-05-23T02:10:24","slug":"getting-ready-to-publish-trying-not-to-claw-face-off-allergies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/getting-ready-to-publish-trying-not-to-claw-face-off-allergies\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting Ready to Publish, Trying Not To Claw Face Off (Allergies)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Greetings my legion of fans! (&#8230;I know you&#8217;re out there playing hard to get, you coy little minxes&#8230;)<\/p>\n<p>I know I said I would post more, and then didn&#8217;t because I forgot there are only 24 hours in a day and a lot of that time is unfortunately taken up by lame stuff like sleep and hygiene and working at a paying job and spending time with the family, etc.<\/p>\n<p>Truth be told, trying to legitimately self-publish my first book (<em>Battlefield High<\/em>) is pretty freaking hard. Sure, I technically self-published <em>Spice of Love<\/em> back in 2015, but I knew nothing back then&#8230;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/giphy.com\/embed\/KEPQfFa3CtzCE\" width=\"480\" height=\"235\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/giphy.com\/gifs\/game-of-thrones-got-you-know-nothing-KEPQfFa3CtzCE\">via GIPHY<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8230;so I just dropped it on Amazon with little to no marketing, and three people and my mom bought it.<\/p>\n<p>BUT I&#8217;m doing it right this time, with a self-pub plan and checklist and everything! I&#8217;m totes legit now. Maybe I&#8217;ll flop, maybe I&#8217;ll be the next <em>Wool<\/em>, who knows!<\/p>\n<p>When reading up on how to self-pub the right way, however, it can be super-overwhelming. You need to do about a million things yourself, such as making\/buying a cover, all the editing, all the formatting (&#8220;Why do extra blank pages appear out of nowhere when I convert my epub file into a MOBI file in Calibre? WHY GODDAMMIT??&#8221;), reviewer requests, marketing, etc&#8230;OH YEAH and all the other stuff to spit-shine my adjacent products like my newsletter and website. For instance, I eventually need to update my newsletter format, change my FREE BOOKS page, update <em>Spice of Love<\/em> and try to market that again to maybe people who care this time, pay attention to analytics and start tracking shit like clicks and impressions and buys and&#8230;\u2026\u2026AND\u2026\u2026\u2026AND\u2026..<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/giphy.com\/embed\/3o6ZtaiPZNzrmRQ6YM\" width=\"480\" height=\"360\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/giphy.com\/gifs\/family-guy-fox-family-guy-foxtv-3o6ZtaiPZNzrmRQ6YM\">via GIPHY<\/a><\/p>\n<p>But you know what? It&#8217;s still almost certain to be better than the traditional publishing route.<\/p>\n<p>Now I&#8217;m not gonna go into a &#8220;WHY ME??&#8221; pity party rant about how much trad-pub sucks balls for everyone except a tiny sliver of successful authors at the top or whatever, because nobody wants to hear that. I did learn a lot going the trad-pub route, so in that respect it was worth it just to experience both options first-hand and be able to weigh the pros and cons of each.<\/p>\n<p>I will say this, tho &#8211; I was shocked at how little value went back to the authors via the trad-pub route (again, excepting the sliver of big authors at the top). In fact, most of the publishing world is geared toward making money <em>off<\/em> authors rather than\u00a0<em>with<\/em> authors. Since most new authors will get little to no marketing help from their publisher, they&#8217;ll often suggest hiring a PR firm or paying for your own ads. Personally, I ended up spending a lot more money trying to market my previous trad-pub books than I will probably ever earn back off sales, and I don&#8217;t think my experience is unique.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Which is unfortunate. So thank goodness for the rise of self-publishing! It&#8217;s a lot more work, but you have a lot more control and can own your potential failure rather than bitching about how trad-pub is so unfair&#8230;\u2026\u2026like some other losers I know\u2026\u2026WHO ARE NOT ME&#8230;\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026&#8230;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/giphy.com\/embed\/3o6ZtnWTs9LKGSefFC\" width=\"480\" height=\"270\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/giphy.com\/gifs\/3o6ZtnWTs9LKGSefFC\">via GIPHY<\/a><\/p>\n<p>ANYWAY, also making things about a thousand times harder are the worst allergies I&#8217;ve had in my entire life. I seriously want to claw my face off right now, or cut off my nose with a butter knife just to allow air back into my nasal passages. Sorry if you now have disturbing images in your head. One of the dangers of being a writer!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Greetings my legion of fans! (&#8230;I know you&#8217;re out there playing hard to get, you coy little minxes&#8230;) I know I said I would post more, and then didn&#8217;t because I forgot there are only 24 hours in a day and a lot of that time is unfortunately taken up by lame stuff like sleep &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/getting-ready-to-publish-trying-not-to-claw-face-off-allergies\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Getting Ready to Publish, Trying Not To Claw Face Off (Allergies)&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Getting Ready to Publish, Trying Not To Claw Face Off (Allergies)","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[361,80,81],"class_list":["post-1645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-allergies","tag-self-publishing","tag-traditional-publishing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Vyi8-qx","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1645"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1655,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1645\/revisions\/1655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}