The D.I.Y. Author

By Kaye Lynne Booth

Being an author today is more than just writing the book. Authors in this digital age have more opportunities than ever before. Whether you pursue independent or traditional publishing models, or a combination of the two but being an author involves not only writing, but often, the publishing and marketing of the book.

In this writer's reference guide, multi-genre author and independent publisher, Kaye Lynne Booth shares her knowledge and experiences and the tools, books, references and sites to help you learn the business of being an author.

Topics Include:
 

• Becoming Prolific
• Writing Tools
• Outlining
• Making Quality a Priority
• Publishing Models & Trends
• Marketing Your Book
• Book Covers & Blurbs
• Book Events—In Person & Virtual
• And more…

• Language: English
• Publisher: WordCrafter Press
• Release date: Jun 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224324118

Kaye Lynne Booth

Kaye Lynne Booth is a multi-genre  who has had a whole collection of children's stories just waiting for the right illustrator. The books in the My Backyard Friends series are inspired by the birds and animals that visit author Kaye Lynne Booth's mountain home. The first three books in the series are Heather Hummingbird Makes a New Friend, Charlie Chickadee Gets a New Home, and Timothy Turtle Discovers Jelly Beans. Author poet and illustrator Robbie Cheadle does the beautiful illustrations that bring this series to life.

Book preview

Introduction

Hi. I’m the D.I.Y. author.

I started my author business from the ground up, and I’ve done it all myself. It’s taken me a long time to get to where I am today, and some people may not think that it’s much, but success is subjective and may be one thing for one author and something else entirely for another. My author business is growing every day, and I’ve done it all at minimal expense. That’s what success looks like for me right now.

Contained within are tips and strategies for getting your author business off and running, and maintaining it, but I’ll warn you now, it is a lot of work. Its pages contain the methods, tools, and sites that I’ve used or plan to use to build my author business. I’m sharing my research to offer a head start for my readers and save them a little bit of time and work.

I’m not a six-figure author, although I have binged every episode of The Six Figure Author podcast, but I have learned a lot about publishing and marketing my books from it and others. I share things I’ve learned from my research, providing links to many of the sites I talk about here, so that my readers will have a place to jump off from, as I continue on my author journey and continue to learn more.

I’m not a bestselling author, so if you are looking for shortcuts to the bestseller lists, you won’t find them here. What you will find are ways to start out small and grow your business, and I promise you, it is a slow and tedious process. I’m just an independent author with a small independent publishing house, who spent a lot of time and money learning to do this stuff, and now I’m trying to make it all work.

In 2008, I began my authors’ blog, Writing to be Read, and landed a few writing gigs on content mills and the like, which didn’t offer any real money, but did offer an opportunity to gain experience and make connections within the author community. If I was going to do this thing, I needed to know what I was doing, so I could do it right. After earning a M.F.A. in creative writing, I discovered that to be an independently published author, I needed more skills than just writing, including business and marketing skills, so I went back for a second master’s degree in publishing.

My first book was published through a small independent publisher, and it sold a handful of copies during my five-year contract. While I waited for sales to take off, I continued to blog, adding other bloggers to my blogging team, and watched as my audience slowly grew. When my contract was up, I didn’t renew, feeling that I could do a better job selling the book myself. I revised that story and re-released it in March 2023 as the first book in my Women in the West Adventure Series and marketed them as western historical women’s fiction. The book has sold more copies than the publisher did in five years, and in fact, it is my personal, best-selling book to date. The second book in the series, Sarah, was just released last month.

I started a small independent publishing house, WordCrafter Press, and formed WordCrafter Quality Writing & Author Services, offering editing services, book blog tours, and book cover design. WordCrafter also organized and hosted two virtual writing conferences in 2020 and 2021, but again, I needed additional skills to do what I was already doing, learning as I went.

My writing is a business, and so is yours, if you’ve published so much as one book. I create five or six books each year, setting a production schedule and sticking to it, for the most part. I create a marketing plan for each book, putting thought into how to promote it. I don’t have a lot of money to invest in advertising, so I stick with methods that are inexpensive or free.

Today, WordCrafter Quality Writing & Author Services offers editing services and book blog tours, and will be adding book trailers and custom covers in 2024. WordCrafter Press has published over twenty books for myself or others, at a current rate of at least five books per year, and book sales have been picking up nicely. I’ve got a great team on Writing to be Read, and the readership is growing steadily. I’m still hoping for that one book that will put me on the bestseller lists, but until then, I’m happy with the steady growth.

My hope with this book is to share that knowledge, so that my experiences might save time and frustration for other authors trying to get their own author business underway. The publishing landscape is changing at an amazing rate, and there is a plethora of information out there still to be learned; for me, too.

The shift away from traditional publishing has been long in coming, but there are options open to authors today, such as direct selling, crowd funding, and subscriptions to offer more sales channels, and higher royalty shares than traditional publishers and book retailers through traditional channels offer. Join me and I will share with you what I have learned so far.

Becoming Prolific

While this in not a book on craft, much of what we will discuss will take place during the writing process, so I’ll be talking about those things here. The first is being prolific in your writing, the number one piece of advice I’ve ever received. The more work you have out there, the more streams of income, and the more people will recognize your name and/or your work.

But how do you do that? How does one become prolific when they are not naturally so?

I know authors, like Kevin J. Anderson and Dean Wesley Smith, who publish eight or nine books per year, which is crazy. But these guys are bestselling authors, so they must be doing something right, right? I knew I couldn’t produce like that, but over time, I found ways to increase my productivity and leverage my intellectual properties. Much of what I learned can be found in Million Dollar Productivity, by Kevin J. Anderson, and I highly recommend it.

To get us started here, though, let me share some methods which I discovered to increase my productivity and get my work out into the world.

Outlining

All through school as a kid, I hated outlining, and when I started writing, I never used one. I would just sit down and start writing whatever was in my