Jay
Cannon is a coworker of mine and he's another aspiring author. I thought it would be great to let
him tell you about his new novel, The Euclidian: When Worlds Collide, and the
process he went through to self-publish.
Here
he is:
I am
honored to be able to post this blog on Derek’s site. Derek was of great
assistance to me in helping me understand the self-publishing process. He also
pointed me towards resources that helped me get my book ready for publication.
The Idea
The idea
for the book came to me about thirty years ago while on a flight from Stockholm
to Dallas. There was no flight entertainment and I ran out of material to read
so I started daydreaming about a kid hitting a tennis ball against the wall in
an alley. Then a little alien shows up being chased another alien with a gun.
The kid uses his tennis balls to knock the gun from the alien’s hand save the
smaller alien. Below is how the scene came to life in my book:
The
guard grabbed the ambassador by the collar and dragged her into an alley. Pico
slipped off and hid behind some bags of refuse in the alley. The guard silently
and aggressively searched the ambassador’s body for Pico, going through her
purse then the pockets and lining of her coat. In frustration, the guard
angrily shoved the ambassador against the wall where Pico was hiding forcing
him out into the open. The guard spotted Pico and pulled out a weapon to kill
him, but the weapon was knocked from her hand by a tennis ball. She looked to
see where the ball came from just in time to get her sunglasses knocked from
her face. She turned to retrieve her weapon but Morgan launched another volley
and knocked the weapon into the street. The guard ran into the street and in
front of a passing police car.
Figure 6. Morgan saves Pico from assassin
The
car screeched to a stop and two policemen jumped out. The guard grabbed her gun
and took off running down the sidewalk toward the ambassador’s apartment
building. One of the policemen fired a shot at the guard but missed his target.
They chased the guard and followed her into the building in time to see her
enter the elevator. As the elevator door closed behind her, the ambassador
stumbled into the lobby. “My apartment is on the third floor!” she said.
“Thanks,”
said the policemen in unison and they headed up the stairs.
They
got to the third floor just as the elevator arrived and stood in front of the
doors with guns drawn. A flash of light slipped through the seams of the doors,
then the doors opened and the elevator was empty.
Writing the Book
I
started the book around November 2009. I spent evenings, weekends, plane trips
and bus rides updating a set of journals with content for the book. A year
later I believed I had it finished. The book had just over 50,000 words. Then
one fateful day I went to a talk by Greg Bear who was discussing his science
fiction book Hull
Zero Three. During the talk he stated that a book with only 50,000 words
wasn’t truly a real book. A book should have closer to 100,000 words to be
taken seriously. My books have closer to 80,000 words.
That
just depressed me. There I was facing the daunting task of trying to double the
size of my book when I had poured all my ideas into it. I took some time away
from the writing and hung out with my friends. Having a few drinks with my
friends Euan gave me an idea for adding an assassin to my book. I also added a
road trip, which is an idea I got from a vampire book I was reading. A year
later I was just over 100,000 words and ready to publish.
Preparing Book for
Publication
I sent
the book to several friends to get their feedback. My son was the only person
to respond with feedback. That is one thing I would warn people on. If feedback
is important, select people that you know will send feedback. I incorporated my
son’s feedback and then went through chapter by chapter to try to cleanup
consistency issues and remove some of the explicit sex. Sometimes late at night
after a few drinks some ideas may seem worthwhile, but in the light of day you
wonder what you were thinking.
After
updating my manuscript I sent it to a professional editor to clean it up. He
not only looked at spelling and grammatical errors, but addressed continuity
and feasibility errors. I hired an artist to do my cover art and a graphic
company to create illustrations inside the book. Understand that artists cannot
see inside your head. So the artwork won’t be a perfect reflection of what your
think they should be. Allow plenty of time to review and redo the artwork.
Once
you have the artwork done getting someone to professionally format your
manuscript for the various electronic and print formats you want to support
will be well worth the cost. The person that formatted my book also formatted
my cover which combines your cover, artwork, bio, book description and ISBN
with barcode.
That
entire process took me about two months. I used elance.com to find the
illustrators and found the other people from Derek’s website. You will need to
have a PayPal account to pay people. I
decided to create two version of my book. One with images, violence and
sexuality; and one without. The storylines are still the same, but I thought
parents might want a version for their young kids.
Selecting Sites to
Sell my Book
Amazon.com
is the number one place to sell books. I used Kindle Direct Publishing
to create the Kindle e-books and CreateSpace
to create the paperback. I also used Smashwords
for the other e-book versions. Oddly enough Smashwords sold the most copies in
the first week.
Marketing the Book
To get
the word posted information about my book on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. I
sent emails to everyone I know. I created display ads for Facebook and Google. I
am running this ad at
the Lincoln Square Cinemas in Bellevue, WA. I’m hosting a book launch party at Black Bottle to spread the word
about my book. I’ll event be selling some there. I had to get a U.S. employer ID
and Washington State license
to do so.
Conclusion
Writing
the book and getting it to market was a huge effort, but well worth it. I hope
to continue to write books as it is greatly rewarding.
Derek says: Thanks
for letting us know how you went about self-publishing, Jay! I’d love to hear
how your marketing efforts go.
Good
luck on the book!
And if
you’re reading this, why not help out a new author and buy his book?
