 So, hello everyone. My name is Stephanie Newell and I am a writer as well as a book coach. I own a company called Write One Publications and I help writers bring their book ideas to fruition. So, today's session is going to be all about writing your first book. We're going to cover a lot of information in a short period of time. But before we do that, I want to kind of walk through so you know where to find me on the internet. So, my website is writeonepublications.com. And if you go on there, you'll see that I offer a variety of different services from manuscript critiques to phone consultations. I also do book marketing services and different things of that nature. I also run a blog, The Write One Blog, if you're looking for tips on how to get started writing, book marketing, self publishing versus traditional publishing, copyrights, ISBNs, it pretty much covers the gamut there. Thelifeoverwriter.net is my personal blog. I also do a YouTube channel if you're just looking for quick three to five minute videos on different topics. I do that there as well. And then the rest is my social media as well as my email address. I encourage everyone to go and sign up for my email list. And if you do, you'll get a free copy of my e-book which is finding beta readers, which is beneficial for anybody that's looking to write their very first manuscript. And then also I'm offering everyone a free 30 minute consultation. So, basically what I'll do is I'll ask you a series of questions to kind of help me understand where you are with the writing. And then we'll work together to kind of determine what kind of help you need in order to get started. So, you can schedule a consultation between the hours of 11 and 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Okay, so a little bit about me. I have been a professional writer since about 2000. I started writing for Unrated Magazine which is an entertainment magazine where I handle like red carpet events, concert reviews, CD reviews and things of that nature. And about 2006, I got the idea for my very first book called The Buzz. And I started writing it and it took me about two years to write it. It took me a really long time to write it. Now, the reason why it took me so long was because I was a very new writer. I had been writing professionally but I had never written a manuscript before. I was working a full-time job. I was working. I'm sorry, I was going to school full-time. I was blogging. I was a mom. And I really didn't know how the whole process went at that particular time. So, it really took me a long time. When I got to about a year and a half into the process, I said, I have been writing this manuscript for so long. And I didn't want to be one of those people that had a computer, had my manuscript on my computer, but never did anything with it. So, I really kind of tried to speed things up and get things done. So, around 2008, I had to make a decision about whether or not I was going to self-publish or traditional publish. And then, you know, self-publishing wasn't as popular as it is now. It's more of a norm now. So, I had all these preconceived notions of what self-publishing was. I thought it meant that I had to go stand in Walmart and sell my book or something. And so, I finally made the decision and I said, okay, I want to traditionally publish. And so, I sent out a couple of query letters because, of course, in order to have a traditionally published book, you have to have an agent first. So, I sent out a couple of query letters and true to my personality, I continued to do research to try to figure out if that was really the right decision for me. As I started to do more research, I realized that whether I was traditionally published or self-published, it would require me to have to do the majority of the marketing. And that really kind of changed my idea about whether or not I was going to self-publish or traditionally publish. So, I stopped sending out query letters and I decided that I would put the book out on my own. And about the early part of 2009, I released my very first book and to great success as it was self-published. So, I was featured on television, radio, magazine, newspapers, and I had a really good response from it. And then in 2009, I co-wrote a book with another author and again, we had a lot of success. We were asked to speak in New York at the Madison Square Garden. We had a news crew come out and feature us and it was just a lot of success around the book. So, people started asking me, how were you able to do that? So, I started a blog and when I started the blog, you know, everyone was like, that's great information. What else can you provide? So, I started Write One Publications, which is a book consulting company and I have been helping writers for about six to seven years to bring their book ideas to fruition as well. So, I'm assuming that everyone in this room has a desire to at least start a manuscript or complete a book. So, that's what we're going to cover today. So, here's some of the things that you're going to learn. You're going to learn how to bring your book idea to fruition, how to outline your manuscript, how to make time for writing, manuscript formatting, how to get your idea onto your computer, how to cater to your target audience, how to choose between self-publishing and traditional publishing, and then the basics of editing your first draft and manuscript critiques. So, if you're considering writing, you have a decision to make, or not, you want to write fiction or nonfiction. And some people in this room have an idea for both books. So, I'm going to kind of talk about both of them. And just briefly, here's what fiction covers. So, fiction covers novels, novellas, and short stories. They're going to be made up of characters and a made-up series of events called The Plot. And then, in addition to the main plot, you're going to have one or more subplots. Fiction also includes conflict and setting, and it's going to be told from a point of view, which is usually first person or third person point of view. And most of the time, it's going to have a theme or a message about life. If you are considering writing nonfiction, it's going to cover biographies, autobiographies, and informational texts. You want to have a title that engages your target audience. You want well-written, factual information. The writer is going to be an expert or has extensive experience in the field or subject matter that they're writing on. It should be well-organized and nonfiction will deal only with real people, real events, and real ideas. And so, this is going to be narrated from the point of view or perspective of the author, who is a real person. So, just to get an idea of where everybody is, how many people here are interested in writing nonfiction? Okay, good. And then fiction? Okay. So, I'll talk a little bit about both. So, when you're writing your first book, you want to kind of hone in on the very main idea that you want to write about. So, that's the first thing you want to do and make up your mind, whether or not you want to write the fiction book first or the nonfiction book. So, a lot of you have ideas and you're wondering where you get additional ideas. How you get additional ideas about your book is, first off, if you are a blogger and you already have a target audience, a group of people that are coming to your blog every day, your ideas are going to be found right there on your blog. You know, when I first started blogging, I had people coming into my comments section and they were writing me questions. And the questions that I would see over and over again were the ideas that I knew that I needed to expound upon with my book. Another great way to get ideas is to utilize your email list. So, reach out to your email list and ask them, you know, what ideas or what subject matters would you like me to speak on? Ask them about their challenges and that's another way to get ideas. An additional way to get ideas is Yahoo Answers. Yahoo has a section on their website where people can go on and ask questions about whatever topic that you write about. So, in my situation, I went and looked up writing and book marketing and all these different things and the questions that I saw being asked repeatedly were the things that I wanted to focus upon in my particular book. And so, that's something else you can do. Google is another great way. So, if you're writing about a certain topic, go right into your Google and put it into the search bar and those first five or ten things that drop down first, those are the ideas that people want to have information on. So, that's another way to do it. If you are writing fiction and you're looking for ideas, draw upon real life. As I said, my very first book was fiction and how I came up with the ideas was that I was freelancing in the entertainment industry and I was being exposed to a lot of different things, celebrities and social media and I took the two, married them together and I created my very first book. So, you can draw upon real life, your friends or family situations or things that are going on. Okay. So, how to avoid Writers Block? You know, as you start writing, it's inevitable that it's going to happen. There are some people that don't believe there's such thing as Writers Block. I do because I believe writing is very creative and when you get into something creative it's really kind of difficult to always have that on. You know, so sometimes you're going to go into a Writers Block. My suggestion for Writers Block is to have a good idea of what you want to write about. When you have a good idea of what you want to write about, it's easier to work through that process. And if you don't, and if you do still get Writers Block, I would suggest that you just go back through edits or do something else so that you can work through that Writers Block that you're experiencing. I'm going to talk very briefly about choosing a book title because I noticed, having done this for some years, that most of the time people have an idea of what they want to call their book. But I want to encourage you to give a lot of thought to the title that you give to your book because your title is what's going to draw your target audience and much like SEO for a blog or for a website, the title of your book is going to contain keywords that attracts your target audience. So you don't want to choose something that's so obscure that your target audience doesn't know that it's for them. And you also want to choose like a subtitle as well so that you can continue to draw your target audience in. So you have your idea for your book. You know whether or not you want to write fiction or nonfiction. I want to talk a little bit about outlining your story and is it necessary. So when I first started my book, I did not outline my book and that might have been some of the reason why it took me so long to write it because I had no idea where the story was going. I just was writing. And as I continued to write and got better at the writing, I made a decision to start outlining my manuscript and it made it such an easier process. So is it necessary? It is not. It's a personal preference. But I believe that it makes the writing easier. How do you create an outline? You know it really is entirely up to you. You can do a very formal outline like they teach you to do in school where you have chapter one and then the bullet points that you want to hit. Or you can do something very casual like I do sometimes if I'm not at my computer I'll just pick up my phone and put it into my notes and say, okay in chapter one I want to talk about this and chapter two I want to talk about that. It may be a long drawn out process but you do kind of want to get an idea of those areas that you want to hit within your manuscript. So how to make time for writing? Now when I first started I sent out a survey to about 20 writers and I asked them what were some of the challenges that they faced. And the number one thing that came up over and over again is everyone said that they didn't have time to write. So I told you initially that it took me about two years to write my book on purpose because I want you to know that you have to learn how to steal time. It doesn't matter if you're the president, a basketball player, a teacher, a celebrity, we all have the same 24 hours in the day and it really is up to you to make a decision about how you're going to best use your time. So for me when I first started writing my book I was living in Chicago. So I had a commute from the south side of Chicago all the way to downtown Chicago 30 minutes to get there on the train. So instead of listening on my iPad or looking out the window, I would pull out my computer and I would write every day for that 30 minute commute to work and then the 30 minute commute back. That gave me one hour every day to write. Instead of going to lunch with my girlfriends, I would go to the coffee shop and I would pull out my computer and I would write for that hour that I had lunch. That gave me an additional hour to write. Instead of going out on the weekend and writing, instead of watching television I would write. And so because of this I was able to get that writing done. Because again you don't want to be the person that has the manuscript on your computer and you haven't completed it. So if you absolutely don't have time, again you're always thinking, you know I know I'm in the car on my commute I'm thinking all the time, you know use your voice recorder on your phone put those ideas into your phone because what my experience has been the longer you stay away from your manuscript the more likely you are not to finish it. I have a lot of people come to me and say, oh I wrote a book about 15 years ago and they're really excited about it at 15 years ago, but the longer you stay away from it, you're not going to write it. I promise you you're not going to write it unless somebody encourages you or something happens that's going to motivate you to write it. So while you have the time while you still have the inspiration find the time throughout your week. I also want to make a suggestion don't feel like if you don't have an hour you don't have time to write. Sometimes I write 15 minutes sometimes I write an hour sometimes I write all weekend so make sure that when you're thinking about the writing process you don't limit yourself to thinking that it has to be a certain amount of time all time is valuable whether it's 200 words that you get written in that period of time or a thousand. So now that you have your idea, you want to get it onto your computer there is a standard guideline that people use when they are submitting their manuscripts to people. So there's a couple of different people you're going to submit your manuscript to there would be an agent if you decide to go the traditional publishing route there would be the publisher if you decide to go the traditional publishing route an editor would look at your manuscript as well as someone like me who would look at your manuscript for a manuscript critique. Now you can write it in whatever format you want to get ready to submit it there is an easier way for us as professionals to kind of read it so that it doesn't take us a really long time to do so. So here's the standard formatting it's one inch margins a 12 point font you have three different fonts that you can choose from Times New Roman Ariel or Courier font you want it to be double spaced this is really important a lot of people want to do the single space but it should be double spaced you want to have a title page and on that title page you're going to drop down to about the middle of the page and you're going to put your physical and email address the title and then you want to include your word count which is very important when you're submitting it to people they want to know how many words your your document is and then in your header you want to include your name and the title of your manuscript on the left and then the page number on the right and that's how you're going to submit it to anybody that you're submitting it to. Oh and just so you know if any of this is still unclear I have a YouTube video on my YouTube channel and it shows exactly how to go through this whole process okay so now you have your idea how do you get it onto your computer so there's you know once you have your idea you may not know how much to write like how long should my book be and there is a couple of things you want to think about there's ebooks versus print books versus genre so let's talk about genre first because let's say you were writing science fiction science fiction is a genre that allows for a big word count so some books are 300,000 words and some are smaller but certain genres allow for bigger books so you want to really do the research as it relates to your book and you can do that you know just by googling it or you can go on Amazon and look at books within your genre and see how many pages those books are and then kind of make your decision based off of that as far as print books are concerned the publishing industry really has already made the guidelines for how big those books should be so when you go on Amazon you're not going to see any super thin books you're really going to see kind of you know really hefty books about you know whatever the topic is that they're writing now ebooks kind of allow you to write as much as you want or as little as you want ebooks as short as 10 pages all the way up to hundreds of pages and what I find is is that the newer the writer the less they want to write so you know you really can have the freedom to write as much as you want to write if you are writing an ebook and especially if you are writing an ebook and you're deciding to sell it through your own website there really is no gatekeeper and you can make a decision about how long that book is now the wonderful thing about Amazon is that they now have a category on their website called short reads and so what they've done is they've determined how many, how much time it takes to read a certain book so you may go on there and see that there is 30 to 45 minutes to read a book 45 minutes to an hour and you can kind of make a determination of how long it will take the reader to read your book so you want to give all of these different things some thought when you're making a decision you want to make a decision about whether or not you want to do ebooks or print books my suggestion is is if you are a nonfiction writer you should probably consider doing both because you can obviously sell your books at events and speaking engagements you can sell it to your clients and then ebooks anybody within the world obviously has access to your book and you can definitely benefit from that so why it doesn't have to be perfect so you may determine that books within your genre are about 200 pages you start writing you can only get to 175 don't feel like you have to drag the book on in order to make it work you know if you have said everything that you needed to say within that period of 175 pages then end your books you know it doesn't have to be perfect just do do the best that you can okay so we're going to talk a little bit about catering to your target audience and we want to talk about it in two ways both the writing and the book marketing so we've already talked about how you use your audience to determine the topics that you're going to talk about we want to also talk about book marketing because as someone has done this for quite some time I find that people wait until their book is complete to tell anyone in their target audience about their book and that is a mistake because then you don't have anyone to sell the book to so you want to draw the readers in from the very beginning especially if you have a blog and you already have a built-in target audience or you have an email list that you're sending out to just start to groom them and let them know that you have a book coming out you can talk to them about the writing process you may want to share a chapter but start to groom them so that when you are ready to publish your book you have somebody to actually market to now as beginning writers or new writers you probably feel like is the hard part and I'm here to tell you that that is absolutely the easiest part the challenge is selling your book to somebody you know so you're going to think that okay I can sell it to my friends and family but once those 10 or 15 people buy your book and that's what everybody says they say I want to sell it to my friends and family but once you sell it to those 10 or 15 people you need more people to sell it to so that's when that book marketing comes in that's when your title begins to get important and all of those things are factors in how you continue to sell your book so ways to determine who's a part of your target audience so I always hear from new writers that my book is for everyone that's like the most common statement I hear made and while that may be true there is a smaller audience that will benefit the most from your book so we kind of want to look at it like this funnel here now I'm going to use myself for an example I obviously target writers so if I were to have a funnel there's a whole bunch of writers that could fall into the top but I want the writers that are going to fall at the bottom so my specialty and my brand is helping new writers so those are the people that are going to fall at the bottom will the people at the top buy it? Absolutely yes they will but my niche market is those people that are going to fall through at the bottom so you really want to make sure when you're thinking about your book that you don't say or subscribe to the theory that my book is for everyone because your book is going to be for a smaller target audience that you want to market it to and those are the people that you're going to market your book to and those are the people that will go out and champion your book and tell more people about your book and help you to sell it so choosing between self publishing and traditional publishing so this is one of the major decisions that you're going to have to make as a writer and there is no right or wrong answer traditionally published is generally going to be a longer route it's going to take you probably one year to two years in order to get that done because you're going to have to have an agent and then that agent first off you got to get the attention of the agent that's the hard part and then once you get that agent they're going to sell your book to a traditional publisher and then that process takes about a year to two years depending on the publisher you possibly will receive in advance it kind of varies for new writers you can get a couple thousand dollars maybe up to about five thousand dollars depending on your main script they will handle for you your editing your book covers your book tours they kind of act as your team and they're going to handle all of that stuff for you it will require you to market like I told you guys earlier when I started doing the research I realized that whether or not I was traditionally published or self published marketing falls on the writer basically so while they will help you a little bit if you have a traditional publisher for the most part you're going to handle the marketing on your own physically both yes both and then they will also help you to get your book into bookstores which is hugely important now as a self published author I was told that my book wouldn't get into a bookstore but I don't subscribe to now so I kept at it and I made sure that my book got into a bookstore and so one of the things that I did to get my book into a bookstore is I went to my school that I graduated the college that I graduated from and the bookstore that is associated with it is Barnes & Nobles and so I said to them I used to go to this school I would like to get my book in here and they allowed me to do that and as a result I was able to get in Barnes & Nobles at the time borders was very popular so I went to my neighborhood borders and say hey I live in the area I would love to do a book signing I went to Costco which is another neighborhood store and asked them could I come and do a book signing there so don't subscribe to you know you can't do certain things you know if you choose to go to self publishing route because you can and I am a living example of I was able to accomplish a lot of things that people thought that I wouldn't be able to accomplish because I was self published now as far as self publishing is concerned there are going to be upfront expenses so where your traditional publisher is going to help you with those costs you're going to have to do that on your own editing and book covers and things of that matter you're going to have to do that on your own now one thing I will say about the upfront expenses cut no costs you know the reason why I was able to accomplish as much as I did was because I wanted to make sure my book looked like any other book I wanted it to compete I didn't want someone to pick it up and go oh that's a self published book you know and know it so if my book sat on a shelf with someone else's book you wouldn't be able to tell the difference so I spent a lot of money and made sure I got a professional graphic designer especially with the editing people will say oh I'll have my cousin edit it no you don't want to do that you don't want to do that because as self published writers you're going to be scrutinized more than someone else that is a traditional publisher so make sure you put that money into the editing if you don't put it into anything else make sure you put it into the editing because as a result what will happen is the people will go on Amazon and they will write reviews and they'll say it's poorly edited the grammar was horrible and that's going to affect your sales and people won't buy it you know they're going to talk about it in your comment in your reviews I should say and that's going to affect your sales so you really want to put your money into that editing and get someone who's well versed in that and knows grammar and all these different things that goes with the editing I think there was something else I wanted to say about editing but I'll come back to it so self publishing is a quicker route you're going to be able if literally if you finish your manuscript today you could get your book up on Amazon tomorrow so it's going to be a much quicker route there is no gatekeeper and with that being said take caution don't feel like I got it done I need to get it up tomorrow really kind of take your time with it and make sure that you're putting it out there because once it's out there it's out there even though you have the freedom to pull it back to leave your reviews regarding whatever you put out there so you really want to take caution another great thing about self publishing is that you have creative control so when I was making that decision about traditional publishing versus self publishing one of the things that I wanted to have control over is the title of my book I had an idea for how I wanted my cover to look and I didn't want anyone to tell me to change it so creative control is really important if you have a traditional publisher and you have their experience which is very beneficial they can tell you what cover sale what titles work well and that's really great and that's the reason why I made that statement earlier about titles if you're not going the traditional publishing route make sure that you are conscientious of the type of words you put in your title so that you're drawing in your target audience again we already talked about self publishing requires you to market you certainly can and take time and do a nice website some of those hideous websites and let's look ten years ago are some of the best selling authors out there and I still have yet to find like a good one a good website? they look very ten years ago they look cyclical and most of them are spun out by the major publisher very true because they still don't understand the social media aspect of it the website aspect of it but that's a very great point so lastly we're going to talk about the basics of... go ahead I'm sorry do you have any additional any additional revenue that I would receive from using intellectual property it was in my book okay and they do because they put up all the upfront costs in order to put the book out there to begin with so that's very common it's a huge decision maker yes a decision maker for me about whether to go with traditional house or self publishing so your preference was self publishing? yeah mine's too and I thought exactly the same way that was another one of the reasons why I decided to go self publishing because you know I didn't want to split my royalties with anyone I wanted to have all the income come to me and you know make the final decisions on everything so great point okay so lastly self editing so I already kind of talked about how important the editing is if you were going the traditional publishing route you don't necessarily need to edit it or have your manuscript edited but I would still recommend that you have someone look at it because if there are too many mistakes grammar spelling and those different things it's going to be really hard to pick up an agent because they're going to feel like you're not a really good writer so you don't have to get it professionally edited but I would suggest that you have someone look at it so as a self editing step I would suggest that you use Microsoft Word and use their spell and grammar check while it's not perfect it will help to pick up some things and you can also read it aloud and that's a suggestion I really make because you know when you're reading something on your computer you may put the word there when you have to actually read it aloud you kind of can hear whether or not make sense if you've used too many words not enough words if it's not very clear so I make the suggestion to read it aloud and it really really is useful go ahead just a free software you can get to and I haven't read that to you before oh really what's the name of that software there's a plugin for Microsoft Word and then there's a program called Palo Poco okay never heard of that A-A-L-A-B-O-K-A and if you look under there a lot of are designed for people with dyslexia learning it works for all others okay there's a website called Ginger it's also free for one of the number of characters who just drop it in there and it'll fix atrocious disabilities oh okay and also do a lot of grammar check alright thank you so much I never heard of that program and then you want to do just basic checks for unneeded capitalization I know when I was in high school and they were teaching us to type they said two periods I mean one period two spaces and that's no longer the case so you want to just kind of do a fine and replace in your document if you have any of those things going on and then the next thing you do after you do the self editing you want to get a manuscript critique and that's something that I can offer basically it's just a professional opinion of how well your manuscript is I can offer suggestions on plot, pacing, voice, writing style conflict, characterization and dialogue and then the next step, the final step after that is to get beta readers so that's going to be people within your target audience so if you're writing let's say self help about health you want to get about five people that really love that topic and ask them suggestions on how you can better make your manuscript so here are some resources for you oh I stopped right on time so here's some resources for you here's a video on the manuscript formatting you can find this on my YouTube channel which is the life of a writer along with a whole bunch of other videos that can help you to get a free copy of that beta reader book I was telling you about you can find that on my blog what you need to do is sign up for my email list and then it will be sent directly to you and then lastly if you still have questions on traditional publishing versus self publishing I have a blog post that kind of breaks down for you to so that concludes my session and I'm open for questions I've never heard of that and follow down it's relatively new isn't it it's been out for a couple of years I know several clients have done that and we're hosting a blog have a lot of content and you can even choose the category and the post and it basically takes all your blog content to format it into a book and an editor just check your flow but you're almost done so if you've been writing and hosting a blog you put that plug in and it's made for WordPress and all the guys you never had any experience with it but I'll look it up thank you certainly can you talk more about marketing so now you have a book whether it's published whether it's self published or a publisher gotta get it out there so the first thing that I did was get publicity so you want to go to those book reviewers bloggers, websites anybody that you feel will feature your book within your target audience and then that will start the momentum and then they'll send it out to their readers you'll send it out to your email list that's a way to market your book you want to put it on your social media you want to use tags that relate to it so that people that may not be a friend of yours can find it it really is just about getting out there doing the traditional stuff like book signings, parties asking your friends to share information giving out business whatever way you can get it out but you want to start it while you're writing your manuscript absolutely want to start it while you're writing your manuscript I was going to say I've worked with a lot of experts in building and environmental and all and all of them want to write a book one of the things, one of the strategies I've had with them that's been pretty successful is to, as you said, outline the book and all the things you want to talk about and organize it and then as their social media just pull things out like blog entries if you're going to do a speech somewhere write that chapter that ends up being your speech that's very focused get it on there but then the real value to that is you get reaction to it so if you have a following and people are reacting to it and the one post may resonate enough for that because of your book and then other things that are just like crickets you're like, well, maybe I shouldn't include that and it's a great way to kind of vet create your audience and I think most people are afraid oh, I'm giving away all the information and you're going to charge to bring it all together in a book or to do small e-books that are on the chapters so you can pull out and kind of get those out there and create the buzz and then it breaks it up into pieces that most people are really busy can handle and then another suggestion I don't know if I gave this one but if you go to Amazon go to read people's books your competitors or who would be your competitors go down and read their reviews the things that people are saying is missing from the books that's the thing you want to write about if you go down to review sections and people are saying over and over again well, she was talking about SEO but she missed this point well, that's the thing that you want to talk about you want to maybe offer a different perspective be contrary to what everybody else is saying but that's another way to come up with ideas for how to what to write about I use a company called Lightning Source but my clients also use Create Space and Ingram it's a lot of different places I wanted to use a company that I felt could make a good final copy and it looked like everyone else's book yeah, absolutely absolutely and yes, Create Space is owned by Amazon mm-hmm go ahead mm-hmm I use stock photos so I would go to just a free royalty stock photo and just make sure that you can use it for commercial release and pretty much that's what you want to do I was thinking more for like public figures oh, okay good question I'm not sure about that actually that's a really good question not very sure that is very helpful yeah, I hear if you google like different self publishing stories success stories you will hear that over and over again people that started off self publishing to kind of gain the momentum because it's a little harder now to get that traditional publishing deal and so if you already have an audience and you feel like you can sell a significant amount of books it's a great way to get started to kind of get the eye of the traditional publisher the other question is about doing a press run a certain number versus printing on demand right, so as far as printing on demand is concerned you know that's beneficial for like if you have a book up on Amazon or something like that and they'll print it on demand as the people order the book as far as a big runners concern I would do that only if I was certain that I was going to sell those books because a lot of times what happens is people have a garage or a room full of books because they thought they were going to sell them but they really you know weren't able to sell them so personally I do runs if I have a speaking event or I'm going to go and do like there's writers workshops all over the world and different things I go to I may do a run of 50 or so books take them with me because I know I'm going to sell them but as far as just housing books in my home I don't do that anymore I did it when I first started because I didn't know any better but as you learn you you know if you don't know that you're going to sell it I wouldn't just do a run right so it depends on the company that you're choosing so I went with lightning source I think there was a setup fee you know usually for them to set up the actual inside tax the cover for you there's going to be a setup fee associated with that if you get a proof copy there's usually a setup fee associated with that which you do want that proof copy because it may look good on the computer but when you get it the text may be way up here way down there so that's you know definitely something you want to do and then after that there's going to be a per price per book so I have two different books I have a really really small book that's like two dollars and something sent to print it you know and then I sell it for ten dollars all the rest comes to me so that's pretty much how it works yeah like traditional publishing yeah now what do you mean by print it at home I'm not certain of that I would suggest if you were going to do that why not just do an e-book that you could do a pdf and sell it from your website or your blog you guys know everything what's it called a mix book? mix mixbook right from your computer wow it's pretty complicated but it's an option yeah okay awesome okay okay there's another one that you can download the app to your computer I built from there I think I've heard of that yeah I've heard of that go ahead so you can get yeah so when I did my book cover seven years ago I paid about $400 to have someone actually you know design my cover and I had an idea for something that I wanted on the cover there was no stock photo for it so I went on Craigslist and I put an ad on there before you know all the Craigslist stuff so I put an ad on there and I said I'm looking for someone to model for my book cover I'm not paying and I got both a photographer and models for free so that's why I said I don't take no for an answer and I encourage all of you not to take no for an answer I got the cover done basically shot for free but I had to pay someone to actually create it and that was about $400 now that was seven years ago before I knew better now I realize that you can get pre-made covers and they can be as cheap as $25 to you know on up if you decide so it really just depends on there's a website if you email me I can give you the website but there's pre-made covers I mean they're everywhere you know and really the thing about it is though you may have somebody else with your same cover obviously you're gonna put your own stock photo in there and change certain things the title is gonna be different but it's you know it's very cost effective you know it's better than paying for $400 like I did and Fiverr great point whoever said that yeah Fiverr yeah great point although I would caution some of those people on Fiverr you know it looks like $5 but I've had I've had covers done for $5 like if I were doing an ebook for my website and I didn't want something really really fancy I'm not gonna pay $400 for that so yeah $5 get my little pdf file for $5 and I'm done $10 but if you were going to Korea would you use a print designer yeah yeah absolutely I would use a print designer I would use a print designer oh okay awesome create space has wonderful templates that you can download in Photoshop or PDF and you can use that as your layout so you can see where the market goes but you have to know how long your book is how big it is it's a little bit more complicated obviously than an ebook cover but create space and I'm not sure about lightning source no lightning source does the same thing they give you a template so you can lay it right on there and you know where the barcode goes and everything you're right any more questions are there any good guidelines to get on that I don't have a lot of experience with that the second book that I wrote was a book that was going to be presented into schools as well but I didn't do a lot of like sources in the book it was really kind of just yeah so I don't have a lot of experience on that somebody back there I saw a hand go ahead yeah I was going to say Scrivener personally I don't use it but I have a lot of clients that really enjoy Scrivener I use Microsoft Word any kind of word processing sources you know good story is story is okay everybody loves Scrivener oh well yeah yeah but once you got it yeah sure sure any more questions yeah there is I think it's what's the five and a half by Aten yeah and when you get ready to print you'll have a whole bunch of different options as far as the size of the book the color of the paper there's so many options on it the weight of the paper the weight of the paper there's so many choices yeah right so yeah you're going to have to start it off in your Microsoft Word document in the standard size that is and then you have to get it typeset which depending on you know who you decide to have do that on the sizing of the page and everything so I actually bought one of his I just bought one of his I love them it makes it so much easier and you can do it right in Microsoft Word and then he'll give you the eBook version of it the regular version it'll have all the fonts everything it's perfect it's like so much easier because when I did my very first book I actually had to buy well I didn't have to buy but I decided to buy Quark Express and I laid out myself two books and it was too much work so you know book designer like she said I found that and again these are all the mistakes I made initially well not necessarily mistakes but doing too much trying to be every single person and now I have book designer and it's so much easier because you can write it it's already set up you don't have to have someone typeset it which is an additional cost for me Quark Express was $800 so that was a huge cost whereas you can just buy the template for $70 or whatever yeah it's book designer you talking about the cover yes absolutely so when you're getting your cover design you want to make sure that it looks good she'll tell you as both a thumbnail yes a thumbnail as well as the big because of course Amazon when your book is on Amazon you're only going to initially see that thumbnail so you want to make sure it looks engaging both big and small now I can't give a ballpark because you know why it depends on so many different things you know like for instance your editor how much is your editor charging I've seen editors charge as little as a couple hundred dollars to thousands of dollars so it really really depends but I guess ballpark you know it could be oh and it also depends on are you going to do a print book are you just going to do an e-book so it really is so many different variables to go into it I guess a couple hundred dollars up to a couple thousand dollars it really just depends depends on the cleanliness of your manuscript how much work the editor has to do absolutely you'll have like when you get ready to send your manuscript to an editor they'll say well let me get your first chapter and they're not saying that because they want to see how good your writing is they want to see how much they're going to charge you based off of that first first chapter is it exactly exactly so that you know they may come back a couple hundred dollars they may come back a couple thousand dollars it just depends and for me I actually had my manuscript edited twice so you know once I got that first round of edits back I was I had new ideas and so I couldn't just put it out so I needed to have it edited again so you know you really can cost can go up there too when you have to get it edited more than once any more questions awesome I hope you guys enjoy today's session I thank you for coming