Hey I’m back . . . I left off the other day talking about publishing. I just want to say, getting published today isn’t the same as it was 5 – 10 years ago. Amazon has made it easy, not to mention all the hundreds of self-publishing companies out there hunting new authors. A warning to the wise, some of the self-publishing companies out there want you to publish with them and will pump your ego up so high that you can’t believe your book won’t to be the next big block buster; a movie deal in the making and so forth. Remember I told you about the sea full of authors and the multitude of books that are available to the public? Well I’m just guessing, but I’m pretty sure if you or I looked up the stats, only 3% of all authors make it.
I did a lot of research before I found a company to go with . . . I suppose it won’t hurt to give them some free advertising, especially since their logo is all over my books; I went with Christian Faith Publishing. My experience with CFP has been educational and a lot of fun. I stayed with them for all three books because of their professionalism. Now I have no idea if they are the best of the best, I just know when I researched other self-publishing companies they were ahead above the others that I looked at. However, I have had many phone calls from other companies trying to pull me from CFP and promised me the world. After each phone call, I would go on line to check them out and believe it or not, their web pages were all the same, making the same promises. I love CFP and have decided to stay with them.
Once my manuscript was sent in (unedited) to CFP, they have 5 editors that went over my manuscript but I only needed 3 to give it a thumbs up before they agreed to publish the book. Then I was told the price (which wasn’t to bad) and my husband, being the supportive man that he is, also gave me the thumbs up. So my journey began.
I told you how horrible my spelling and grammar were, didn’t I? Well the first edit came through and I was crushed at just how bad my spelling, grammar, punctuation and so on were. English is not my forte and if I didn’t understand that before my first round of editing with CFP, I definitely did afterward. So my education began with the editing process. My first book, An Inheritance of Hope, was my learning curve.
My first round of edits were done by my wonderful friends that read the manuscript before I even sent it into CFP. Believe me they found a ton of mistakes. Then after twenty rounds of edits with CFP (no joke) I thought I was done. Mind you, many of those mistakes were sentence structure, which was on me to find and change. This is the process that took the longest. Then my book gets published (not for the public viewing yet. CFP gave me 10 free copies of my books before they go public which I had to read and make sure it was good to go) and I gave the free copies out to the same group of ladies and to two other friends, one that just happened to be an editor in a previous life. BAM! She gives me my book back with red marks all over it. Augh!
This is where CFP came through and did the right thing by taking the new edits and made the corrections. Once a book goes to print they will make corrections but you don’t want to ever get that close to releasing a book to the world and have to pull it to fix a few things. To this day I can’t read An Inheritance of Hope without thinking I should have written a line differently, or I should have added something. Don’t get me wrong, I love the story, it’s just now after reading it twenty plus times, I can’t read it anymore. I’ll leave that to the all those avid readers out there.
Now with the second book of the series, The Restoration of Hope, I learned a valuable lesson; edit, edit, edit your book before you send it in. I bought a program (I’m still not sure if I like the one I bought so I won’t give it any free advertising) but I put my entire book through the program and managed to clean the manuscript up quite a bit. I gave the manuscripts to my trusted friends, including the friend that used to be an editor. In all, I had seven set of eyes and an editing program combing through my book before I sent it into CFP. After receiving all the manuscripts back, I made the corrections. I know, why didn’t the editing program find all the mistakes? I can’t answer that, but my friends found a lot of mistakes that the program should have caught.
Now one thing I would like to mention before closing is that every publishing company, be it traditional or self-publishing, you have to do the work of promoting yourself, by yourself. None of the publishing companies are going to do it for you. CFP sent me a packet with a lot of great ideas on how to promote my books. Something that I’m implementing now. I’m sharing all this because I want to give my fellow writers out there a little free information. Everyone wants to take your money . . . I’m not that person. I am sharing my experiences for free. Learn from it or ignore it, that’s up to you. I have watched countless videos and read many articles on ways to promote your books, all of which, tell you nothing and at the end of each one, if you pay them $$$, they will give you tips on how to promote your books. Good grief, when does it stop. Anyway, I will continue to share my experiences as they happen and hopefully you can learn from them and spring board off them to success. Best of luck to you on your journey.Until next time,
Larissa