A Different Face to Publishing

Since having written and self-published When God Turned His Head in 2010, I realized that the book was one of those self-published books that the big publishing companies warn you about. It was a good story, but poorly proofed, poorly formatted and poorly marketed.

Over the next few years I was able to take care of the proofing and formatting problems which enabled me to write eleven books in eight years. I even did most of my own cover designs. People complemented me on the quality of my paperbacks and the final product in digital format.

I can create a book from scratch without additional costs. (At least until recently when the cover design site that I had been using became a paid site.) If I can do it for myself, why not do editing and formatting for others as well?

I can write my own books and publish them, but after several years of writing books I realized that my bottleneck was now in marketing those books. The books weren’t selling, and it wasn’t because they weren’t any good. Rather it was because I just had not had enough publicity and I couldn’t afford to get it in the traditional manner.

During the past several months, I have been working on creating a marketing system to help me promote my books. I have been reading a lot of different books related to marketing and selling. This is not a subject that most authors, particularly fiction authors are adept.

Not long after I published When God Turned His Head, I knew I wanted to start my own publishing company. This company would do like most publishing companies do and publish the books and distribute them to (Independent) bookstores, but in addition, we would also go beyond what most publishing companies do and assist authors in the marketing process. I would include a public relations department in the publishing company.

The Birth of a Publishing Business

About a year ago, I named this future business Jerjoboch Publishing, and I have been thinking about services that Jerjoboch will offer authors. These services will be offered in such a way that all authors can afford to use these services. The business will offer a low monthly service where authors will have the ability to have access to several author services that the authors provide for one another.

The self-publishing projects will be divided into three different sections.

One: Writing and Editing

• Educational Courses offered for writing fiction and nonfiction books-authors themselves can produce these videos and written documents to share with others who would like to be authors.
• Editing services exchanged between authors so they don’t need out of pocket financing for this service.

Two: Publication• Formatting manuscript for print

•  Formatting manuscript for digital formats
•  Designing book covers for print and digital books
• Print on Demand

Three: Marketing and Sales

• Platform formation (created before publication)
• Marketing During Launch-including bookstores, libraries, guest posts, reviews, interviews (online and in person) events (online and off)
• Marketing Post-launch-continue marketing types as during launch and trade shows.

Other Ideas for this type of Publishing Business

• Create a fund for authors just starting out.
• Teach authors about crowd-sharing, do campaigns where authors help one another out.
• Work as a team to get crowd funding for the collective group to use for tradeshows and other events.
• Sell stuff online and off that promotes our business to other authors and those who support authors.
• Have creative writing groups in schools and in child organizations around the country to help create more imaginative authors.
• Work with radio stations and podcasters to get authors onto programs.
• Have a list of low-cost resources available at a low cost per month and have a list of items that have some revolving cost every month.
• Create and promote our own online (and brick and mortar?) store to sell books in print and digitally.

So what do you think? What are some other ideas that authors and soon-to-be authors need to become more successful at earning an income writing?