‘What’s the best way of getting people to know about my book?’ asked an author, at the end of a talk I recently gave on marketing.

There is no ‘best’ way. Every book is different, and what works for one author may not work for another. If you write in a particular genre, for example romance or sci-fi, then maybe the best form of marketing is simply to write more books and make sure they’re set up correctly on Amazon and other retail sites.

Personally, I find that traditional press coverage is a good way of marketing my books, because despite being fictional, they are all based on a real-world issues that I care deeply about (sexism in the city, fame culture, lads’ mags, disenfranchised youth, the London Riots and so on), so I comment on these issues in the national press, with the byline ‘Polly Courtney, author of …’. If your book also touches on real-world issues, or if you have an interesting back story yourself, then this technique might also work for you. If you write about zombies in outer space, it might be less relevant.

As I say in my video, the first and most important stage of getting press coverage is asking the question: Who’s my book for?

Please, don’t say ‘everybody’; it’s neither helpful nor true. You need to think really hard about who your readers might be – I mean those people who would pick up your book before any other, the ones who will tell all their friends about it. I mean your advocates. Perhaps it’s a demographic group, based on the characters you’ve written about. (For Feral Youth, some of my readers were young adults, as the protagonist is a 15-year-old girl.) Or maybe it’s a group with a shared common interest that’s aligned to the themes in your book: vegetable growers, skydivers, heavy metal fans… or maybe it’s an attitudinal group: liberals, right-wing types.

Once you’ve identified your target readers, think about what type of media they consume. Are they online all day, or out in the garden listening to Radio 2? Do they read The Guardian or do they skim Twitter for news on their phone? What do they watch? Note down every single programme, channel, publication, event and website you think they might like, then dig around for the contact details of the producers, editors and curators. This will take time, so set aside a few hours for searching.

Here’s the most common mistake people make when they publish a book: They think that this is news.

It’s not. There are 100,000 titles published each year in the UK. That’s an average of 275 books launched every day. Even the news desk of your local newspaper probably gets bombarded with ten press releases a week, saying ‘Local author launches book’. This is not a story.

Your ‘angle’ might be the story behind the book – the real-life events that led you to write it in the first place. Were you in the army? Did you work in a crèche? Or it might be the way you wrote it. Did you scribble it down in your lunch hour, or type it into your phone? My biggest success in this respect was the ‘inside story’ I wrote for the Observer back in 2006 about my less-than-glamorous experiences in the square mile, entitled My high-flying City job was not worth a life of misery. There’s usually something that makes your story uniquely interesting.

By the way, all of this thinking should happen long before you publish. Ideally, start to plan your marketing six months before publication. This may sound like overkill, but if you’re planning to approach print publications, you have to work with their timelines. Glossy magazines have a three-month lead-time and if you intend for people to read the book, you’ll need to send out Advance Review Copies well in advance.

The other reason you need to plan in advance is that ideally, your ‘angle’ should tie into another news story. Journalists are pack animals; they only cover a story if there’s a ‘buzz’ around the subject already. If you’ve written a book about alternative methods of parenting, it won’t make the national news – unless, for example, Victoria Beckham makes a statement about motherhood. This is your time to strike. You can set up a Google News Alert to tell you when your subject hits the headlines.

When you make your approaches, be professional. Use the journalist’s name, not ‘Sir/Madam’. Be succinct and state briefly who you are, what you intend to write and why you are qualified to write it. Check out the example email I use in my video. Oh and don’t harass them if you don’t get a reply! They receive hundreds of emails every day.

Press coverage is just one way of generating awareness of your book. Other ways include Making a Book Trailer (the subject of my next post) and Holding an Epic Book Launch (the one after that). Until then… good luck with that marketing plan!

You can read all 6 parts of Polly’s #DoingItBetter series on Self-Publishing here, or here’s the link to the video playlist only.

Writers are observant people – right? That’s why we write good books, because we notice the little things like the shopkeeper’s nicotine-stained fingers, or the puff of white smoke on the horizon.

Well, this is a fortunate trait when it comes to getting your book on the shelves, because frankly, the best way to publish is to replicate what the traditional publishers do – with a few improvements.

I’m assuming you’ve got a final draft of your book. (This means a book that has undergone all four stages of editing – see my Editing Your Book post.) I’m also assuming you have a full wrap-around cover for your book (see my other post, Getting an Awesome Cover Design). In addition, you need your back-of-book blurb, your ‘back matter’ and your ‘front matter’.

Your ‘blurb’ is what goes on the back of the book. It’s also the text that gets used on all the online retail sites like Amazon. It needs to entice people to crack open your book – that’s all. It’s a taster. A teaser. Don’t try and summarise everything that happens in your book. It’s totally fine to leave lots out. In fact, all you really need to do is identify the premise of the book, give a flavour of the theme and/or style, and leave readers gagging for more. As I say in my video, self-publishing is not about doing everything yourself. You’ll get a much better result if you collaborate with others along the way. This goes for cover design, editing and everything else, including blurb-writing. Get a friend to help – preferably someone who works in marketing, because that’s what this is.

The ‘front matter’ consists of all those pages you see at the front of a book before the narrative begins. Use your powers of observation; see what these pages look like in other books you have at home, or in the shop. The same goes for ‘back matter’. A quick tip here – and this is something that many publishers don’t think to do: Make sure the first thing your reader sees when he/she gets to the end of the book is a list of any other books you’ve written (or you’re writing) and a website link for them to register their interest. This way, you’ll catch them when they’re dying to read more of your stuff. If they drop their email address into your website, you’ll be able to alert them when your next book comes out. This is very important!

If you’re planning a paperback edition, you need to get your pages typeset. I don’t recommend doing this yourself, but if you’ve got the skills and software, go ahead. Otherwise, a typesetter will set you back about £100 for a full-length novel. (There are a few here, or the Alliance of Independent Authors lists a number of vetted professionals.) You might want to use a publishing house for this, as well as the printing and distribution. I use Matador, but there are a number of options. The DIY route involves uploading straight to Amazon using their print-on-demand Createspace offering, which is pretty much free and (if you tick the box) can offer distribution to all online retailers, not just Amazon.

Everyone should have an ebook. The only exceptions might be coffee table photographic books or those with lots of visuals, but for books that are mainly words, you need an ebook!

Making an ebook is just a question of converting the file you used to write the book – usually Word or similar – into a new format. There are various software programmes out there to do this, such as Calibre, or you could pay someone to do it for you. Beware: Many companies will charge up-front and then charge you more to correct any formatting errors that will inevitably have crept into the first conversion. Doing it yourself is free and allows you to convert as many times as you like, until it’s perfect – and it must be perfect! Check it a hundred times. Get ebook-reading friends to check it too. There’s bound to be a random blank page in there somewhere, or strange spacing between words. These things happen.

Your choice of publishing partner(s) and formats will depend on your book, your likely readers, your budget and your aptitude for doing things yourself. These days, it’s possible to do this stage for almost zero up-front cost, which is great because it means you can invest your money in the things that really matter: editing and cover design.

So, that’s how to get your book on the shelves. Next time, I’ll be talking about getting your book flying off the shelves in my post on Getting Press Coverage.

You can read all 6 parts of Polly’s #DoingItBetter series on Self-Publishing here, or here’s the link to the video playlist only.

First off, a confession: I didn’t do this for my first novel.

Bizarrely, it hit number 2 on Amazon anyway, due to various pieces of press coverage (which I’ll talk about in my Getting Press Coverage post), but I can’t help wondering whether it might have made it to the top-spot if I’d known then what I know now about cover design.

As I say in my video, authors should not design their own book covers. There are no exceptions. Even if you’re a designer by trade, you should get a fresh pair of eyes on the project – a designer friend, perhaps – if you can’t afford the £500-£1,000 it’ll cost you to get a professional to design the full wrap-around cover and thumbnail.

A word of warning up front: If you’re calling in favours from a friend who knows a bit about design, make sure he or she understands book cover design. There are a whole load of book-specific rules around fonts, layout, margins, kerning and other mysterious things that I’m not going to talk about here, which your designer should live and breathe so that you don’t have to. (You’re heading up the publishing house, remember – not doing everything inside it!)

Hopefully I’ve convinced you to collaborate with a book cover designer. So… where will you find such a person? Well, one way is to wander round your nearest book store (or Amazon, if you prefer things virtual) and pick out a few designs you like the look of. Turn the book over (or click to expand the thumbnail) and you’ll see the name and/or website of the designer, somewhere near the barcode. Beware: Some designers won’t take on independent commissions and some might be out of your price range, but if you dig around, you should find someone suitable.

Alternatively, there are lots of marketplace websites, this being one of them, which aim to match authors with service providers such as cover designers. Make sure you get genuine testimonials from previous clients and of course, only go with a designer who has worked on books of a similar style or genre. If someone has spent their life designing sci-fi novel jackets, it’s unlikely to be a good match for a romance writer.

Getting the right designer is the hardest and most important part. Once you’ve done this, you need to get him or her to understand your book and the vision you have for it. In an ideal world, your designer would read the book, but at the very least, sit down and talk it through. Show him or her any examples of books in a similar style and share any thoughts you have on colours, themes, fonts etc. Don’t be too prescriptive. The designer should have the freedom to come up with ideas!

As you’ll see in the video, coming up with the perfect design is an iterative process. You will hopefully start with a few different options, then narrow it down to one core concept, which you can collaboratively hone until you have the perfect layout, colours, fonts, spacing and so on. One of the great things about self-publishing is that you can liaise directly with your designer, rather than being at the mercy of a committee of marketers, editors and other people who haven’t read your book.

Test out your concepts! This is a great way of getting potential readers to engage with your project ahead of publication. I often put the shortlist up on my Facebook page for fans to compare. You’d be amazed at how differently people perceive the designs and you might find that the artwork is giving off entirely the wrong vibes. It’s better to learn this now than when the Amazon reviewers are complaining about being misled.

As I say in my video, it’s only when you have the perfect front cover (which needs to work as a small thumbnail as well as at scale) that your designer will work on the full wrap-around cover. For this, you’ll need your back-of-book ‘blurb’, which I’ll talk about in my next post, Publishing Your Book.  In reality, you’ll probably do all these things simultaneously, working with your editor(s) to produce your final draft, collaborating with your designer to get the perfect cover, agreeing on your publishing and distribution while planning your marketing. It’s not as arduous as it sounds – promise! Next time I’ll be talking about the mechanics of publishing, i.e. getting your book on the shelves, both physical and virtual. Until then… good luck!

You can read all 6 parts of Polly’s #DoingItBetter series on Self-Publishing here, or here’s the link to the video playlist only.

‘But my grammar is excellent,’ protested a man in the audience at a recent conference on self-publishing. ‘And my wife proof-reads my books,’ he went on. ‘So why should I hire an editor?’

OK. Deep breath. Here’s the thing. Editing is about so much more than just grammar and typos.

You can get your spelling and punctuation perfect, but if you haven’t had a structural editor ruthlessly tearing your book apart, or a line editor getting it as tight as it possibly can be, you’ll just be polishing a turd. (Sorry.)

As I say in my video, there are four stages to editing and you should do them in this order, because there’s no point in getting the details right if you then go on to change the entire premise of the book.

Structural editing is what most writers find the hardest, because it involves killing your darlings – you know, those characters you put in just because they reminded you of those people you met on the train that time? – and it involves turning the whole narrative inside-out, twisting and flexing it until it ends up in a completely different order or style. My first novel was a non-fiction book before an astute editor laid eyes on it. With my latest, I was merrily writing the novel from two different perspectives in alternating chapters until my editor – fortunately after only the first ten thousand words – pointed out that I didn’t need the second character’s voice. I literally scrapped every other chapter.

You need a professional editor. This is where to spend your budget – this and cover design. Expect to pay around £5 per thousand words for a good editor, although if you’re using a friend [who is also a professional editor!], you might be able to negotiate mates’ rates. I open my manuscript up to a trusted set of readers sourced from Twitter and Facebook at this point, to build on the suggestions made by my editor. The result is surprisingly non-conflicting. I would never rely on this alone, however. Professional editors exist for a reason. Oh and you absolutely cannot do this part yourself. Sure, you can (and should) re-draft your book a number of times until you’re really happy with it, but it’s not perfect yet – believe me.

Line editing comes next. This is something you can have a first-stab at yourself. Try reading each sentence out loud. Does it make you cringe? Right. Go back and change it until it works. Again, you should get a professional to help – possibly the same one you used before, although fresh eyes always help. Does the dialogue sound right? Is the narrative consistent? Are there words you use far too often? (We all have writers’ tics. Draw up a list for next time!)

Copy editing is about the details: grammar, spelling, consistency, timelines. If your book takes place over a year, or a summer, or even a day, then make sure everything that happens is in the right order, with appropriate references. Don’t talk about cherry blossom in winter, or kids in school uniform in August. Again, it’s best if you can get a fresh pair of eyes on your manuscript, as your editor (and certainly you) will just read what you expect to see on the page.

Proof reading is the final stage and for me, this is where the second set of crowd-sourced reader volunteers comes in. You’d be amazed at how many people want to get their hands on a copy of your book ahead of publication. Some people are ‘big picture’ types, so set them to work on the structural editing, but proof readers need to be irritatingly observant – like the people who go around correcting the grammar on shop signs.

Once your manuscript has been through all four stages, congratulations! You have your final draft. Next time, I’ll be talking about Getting an Awesome Cover Design, which is the next step in getting your book on the shelves.

You can read all 6 parts of Polly’s #DoingItBetter series on Self-Publishing here, or here’s the link to the video playlist only.