Early Morning Goodness
This is yet another great vibe that sets the mood for great things to come with work, study and chill.
Hope you enjoy this Music Lab track as we take a quick look at some of the considerations when it comes to publishing your work as a book.
The First Bit: Writing
There is no single best way to start to write all books, and the things I'm going to share here today and in the future are purely my own approaches to things. With that said, I already had the topic in mind for publishing (i.e. the science behind the MOOVPAD project). This made it a little easier for me to start because the vision was clear.
I began by putting the content directly into Adobe InDesign, which I believe is somewhat of an industry standard. Specifically built for print publishing, it helped me to visualise how the content should be structured and what the final results might look like. The other important thing in my case was realising that, beyond a certain point, my own content needed to be separated into more than one book. This was not just because the length was getting to be too long, but also to make the content modular so that potential buyers would be able to choose which parts were most relevant to them. We'll look at these things and the planned content of the books more in the future.
Getting the ISBN
Technically speaking, any book you publish does not necessarily need the barcode that you usually see on the back cover of a book. But if you plan on selling your book, you do need to have an ISBN. This is actually a good thing for you because although it costs a little bit, it also helps you later when it comes to promoting your work online.
The ISBN is issued to you by the nominated authority in your country (e.g. in Australia, it's Thorpe Bowker). Once you have the ISBN, and the barcode to help with logistics and sales downstream, you include these in your print file when it's finished and you're good to go. So with your writing and preparation work complete, what's next?
Choose Your Publishing Type
Really briefly, you can either use a service like Amazon's self-publishing service, or you can find a suitable small-run printer convenient to you and then promote the book yourself, or you can combine both approaches.
Your Own Site
Regardless of which approach you use, it is very important to have your own site ready for the time when your book is actually ready to publish. So it's best to get this ready ahead of time. This will help with not just selling your work and promoting it, but also engaging with your audiences, building and maintaining a relationship with them moving forward.
Keep It Updated
Unfortunately, your work doesn't stop when your book is released. It actually just got started! You now need to keep everything regularly updated. This includes the book itself (revisions of the work as needed), the site and any socials (for audience engagement), and relationships with all the stakeholders in your supply chain (e.g. resellers, distribution partners, etc). So in my case as an example, I prepared a few different strategies to get my work ready and then published, I made sure to get this site ready and setup the Store component in advance, arranged this Blog and started using it in advance to be able to reach you, and so on. All of these things now need to be maintained and updated moving forward so as to hopefully continue building on the relationship with you guys, and the brand too moving forward.
Stay awesome,
EMH
