Day 1 - Journey of a Thousand Miles
First blog post, day 1. My name is Melanie Brodie and I’m a writer. I’ve decided to dip my toes into the self-publishing world and I know nothing about it. Almost nothing. I know very little about it. If you’re a reader, welcome. I hope you like what I write. Sign up for the newsletter and I’ll be sending out early chapters soon. If you’re a writer, welcome to you too. I’m going to be sharing my self-pub journey here. You should also join the Readers Collective or follow on Twitter if you want to track my progress.
I’m learning as I go and have decided to share my experiences, tips, resources , everything free of charge. I can’t stand it when someone writes a moderately successful book and then makes the rest of their money selling courses. Information is meant to be shared. So if you’re new to the self publishing medium, I hope you’ll get something out of this.
Thirty days. That’s how long I’m giving myself to publish my first novella. I wanted it to be a novel, but the story itself dictated when it would end. So novella it is. I’m currently in the editing stage of the novella and am starting on setting up my marketing whatevers. Campaigns? OK.
Here’s what I did today:
Set up simple Squarespace site - I am familiar with Squarespace and already have an account.
Set up Gmail account
Set up Twitter account
Transfered Dreamhost DNS to Squarespace - complicated
Signed up for AWeber, set up simple marketing list - 14 day free trial
Work on, design, website. Keep it simple.
Installed AWeber Code into site
Created spreadsheet to track expenses - have spent $37 so far
Created circle profile photo in Canva
Gave myself a 30 day deadline
Posted too much on Twitter, decided it should be a daily blog
Fiddled with AWeber’s design tool to make newsletter form look nice
Lots of website tweaking - wrote “about page“
Watched how to set up newsletter on squarespace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imlBHC44FCE - useless unless you use Mail Chimp or others connected to SquareSpace.
Blog post #1
First major snag: AWeber is more expensive than Squarespace’s internal newsletter. Further, I would have to upgrade my plan to use the code required for AWeber. Now cancelling my account. Squarespace’s internal marketing seems pretty good so far. It looks like AWeber is keeping my $19 for the first month even though I just set it up today. Squarespace newsletter costs $7 per month.
Do I know what I’m doing? No. Am I crazy? Maybe. Today was all about setting up my online universe. I’m still on the fence about setting up Facebook and Instagram accounts. Social media is a lot of work and I only have an arbitrary 30 days to go. I may not know what I’m doing yet, but I will. This is an experiment. I don’t claim to be a guru or some magical self-publishing wizard. Do you ever read articles about self-publishing and think: This person assumes I know what *KDP stands for. Doesn’t it feel like an insider game? I’m not trying to bad-mouth the teachers out there who know their stuff, but self-publishing has a steep learning curve and a million little tasks. Those who have been doing it for years come from a place of excellence and assume their readers know what’s called what. I’m starting at zero. I know nothing. I am unknown and I want to learn. I’m just like you. I’m fairly confident I won’t do everything right, but this blog will keep me accountable. Sharing means I have to keep track. I’m not inherently a planner so this is new territory for me. Tomorrow, I’ll be setting up a list of goals. I don’t usually do that. Tonight I tried to sit down and write it out, gave up, and started writing this blog post. Maybe I should call this blog: Self Publishing for Procrastinators.
This is an ongoing journey. It’s not intended to TEACH anything. It’s about sharing the ride. I hope you’ll come along. If you have questions, I’ll answer them to the best of my ability or point you in the right direction. Let’s help each other out. If you see me making heinous mistakes, let me know. We are all writers and readers. We all have one thing in common: A love for the written word. Until tomorrow.
*KDP stands for Kindle Direct Publishing