Book Stack: Software and Tools for a Self-Publishing a Book
I just put out a book, Bronze Seeks Silver: Lessons from a Creative Career in Marketing. Half-memoir, half-guidebook, it traces my nearly 30 years in advertising and digital marketing with embarrassing stories and hard-earned wisdom. Writing the book was one huge lesson in discipline and patience, but finding the right tech stack has been more than I expected. Here I’ll share not necessarily what I recommend (though some I do), but what I have used so far for product management, distribution, marketing and reporting.
Product
The manuscript has shifted back and forth from MS Word to Apple’s Pages and back. Part of my everyday for work, I’m simply used to them. I heard great things about proper writing software such as Scrivener and Ulysees (which I tried and paid for), but after editing one chapter, I didn’t have the patience for anything new and cowardly retreated to familiar old, clunky, unhip Word.
Design seemed the opportunity to take it up a notch. To format my first ebook, a compilation of content from my podcast about moving from the city to the country, I invested earlier this year in a paid subscription to Designrr.io. With photos of farms, chickens and donkeys, my book had a lot of fun visuals so I was more concerned with the images than formatting the text. Pricing was decent ($14/month) and there was a helpful Facebook group hosted by an attentive employee for support. The book came out okay, but I think I rushed it. If I had more design skills and was more disciplined about style sheets, I probably would have done a much better job.
This second book, Bronze Seeks Silver, is more of a memoir with few photos so I was lucky to discover Reedsy, a software platform and marketplace which is free for manuscript formatting and, incredibly, has one-click exporting into paperback sizes and ebooks of all formats (epub, mobi and PDF). It’s very slick, with professional-quality formatting and so easy to use a moron like me looks like Gutenberg.
The cover I knew was important so I used Reedsy to bid out the job to three designers via the platform and hired David, an award-winning one from the marketplace (~$800–1,000 plus Reedsy adds a fee). David was great with cover design concepts, a thoughtful process, and importantly, formatting the final cover correctly for paperback and ebook as well as creating extra graphics I could use for marketing.
If you’re doing a paperback, you need to get an ISBN so I bought one through ISBN Services for the printed version and two more for the digital versions ($18/each). For the ebooks, the platforms you sell on like Amazon, Kobo and Barnes & Noble will give you free ones from them but I wanted to have a single one for each format to better track over time.
Distribution
Amazon KDP platform is all-powerful so that is a no brainer for both ebook and its paperback on demand printing, though the interface feel like it’s 2005. In addition to Amazon, I also chose to distribute on Rakuten Kobo (ebook only), Barnes & Noble.com (ebook & paperback), some local bookstores (paperback) and on Gumroad (ebook) which I already use for my podcast merch. There are plenty of articles and videos on whether or not you might want to do Amazon KDP Select and restrict sales to KDP for 90 days or not. Royalties are 65–70% for the most part for the ebooks. Frankly, I wonder whether it’s worth distributing so many places for an amateur like myself and I’d be better off focusing resources, time, and build expertise.
Marketing
I’m a marketer by trade so I foolishly am trying to do this by myself, although it is a good way to learn more of the tools and platforms as well as make mistakes first-hand.
The website is the hub. I bought my URL at GoDaddy and redirected it to host on a basic two-page website on Mailchimp, where I could integrate the site and email list. I like Mailchimp so far, especially to build a list and manage email campaigns. Many people host a fancier, bigger site on a more customizable platform such as SquareSpace or WordPress but since I was already losing my mind when it all got underway in July, I decided to keep it simple with Mailchimp’s plug-and-play tools and widgets. The result, at least I believe, isn’t terrible. I ended up hiring my book designer David for a few additional hours to help with design elements that I couldn’t crack myself. Note: Mailchimp has a free tier, but I wanted more templates and ability to market to more than one audience so I’m paying for the Essentials Plan ($10.80/month) which I still think is a steal.
For web analytics, I’m using Google Analytics which I also use for my Cidiot podcast site. I still don’t really know how to use it properly, but I regularly login, click on various buttons, and nod gravely at the screen as if I know what I’m doing since I know Google is watching. What I need to do is not just learn what all the fields mean but properly connect Mailchimp’s ecommerce buttons to Google Analytics. That’ll be another Sunday clinic.
Creatively, Canva is my go-to for super-easy graphic design and formatting posts that fit Facebook, Insta, Twitter, Linkedin and nearly anything else. Canva even integrates with Mailchimp which is nice.
For paid advertising, I was excited to Amazon Advertising. There are plenty of guides, but most helpful was Kindlepreneur Dave Chesson’s video class, which is free. I set aside three hours on a Sunday and now know exactly what to do and how to do it. My first campaign, targeting specific books that might pair nicely with my career memoir, goes live this week. Chesson also created Publisher Rocket, a piece of software for finding and managing keywords, which I will buy ($97) if I struggle with this first attempt to make my own choices manually.
Reviews are crucial for marketing materials like press releases, the website and of course on the product pages for launch. I got ahead of it by asking industry friends with fancy titles to read the book in advance (thank you!) and also using ExecThread, a top-tier executive recruiting service with a killer list, to call for reviewers that I didn’t know in the industry with followings who could be influencers and advocates. I found three.
There are many pay-to-play services out there to promote your book, run giveaways, tweet on your behalf. I have no advice on which are useful and which are a waste of money. I’m instead testing many of them including Reedsy’s Discovery Service ($49), Goodreads Giveaways ($119), Independent Author Network ($25), and Whizz Books ($49). These last two seem to tweet a lot about my book and gave me a page but I seriously can’t tell if any sales will come from them.
Based on advice from others who have marketed nonfiction books, especially in marketing, I’m developing an idea with a producer for a trailer video and considering investing in a sponsored ad on highly targeted email subscriber list like ExecThread or targeted ads on Linkedin. Everyone I have asked has said don’t pay for Facebook ads for books.
Not everything costs money. I’ve submitted to a few newsletters of groups I’ve been a member, written some guest blog posts (one site even paid me), and am appearing on several marketing-related podcasts as a guest. I’m also attending some events, including one hosted by my college fraternity. There’s also of course my own social feeds which I’ve cluttered up with my self-promotional narcissism, and while I haven’t started to lose followers yet, I’m sure I will need to turn it down a notch and reduce frequency as the news of the book becomes old.
Reporting & Workflows
I’ve kept it simple so far with Google spreadsheets for project management and tracking costs but will likely move over to something like Monday or even use Canva’s to track promotional assets. This is also why I need to get my analytics working properly. Otherwise, I’ll never know what is driving traffic and where.
Sheesh. That’s a dozen platforms so far, practically a Lunascape of tools. And I’m barely a week in.
