Advance Your Career Through Self-Publishing

[00:00:01.570] - Liz Fraley

Welcome to the TC Dojo from Single-Sourcing Solutions, the TC Dojo is a techcom community driven by you. Tell us what you want to learn, you choose the topics, and we find the experts. In the TC Dojo session today, I'll be talking about why techcom folks make great Indie Publishers. I'll show you how to put two books together in about five months. We do have a lot to cover. I've been through the process several times and although I've improved my own process each time not everyone needs to do what I've done.

[00:00:31.270] - Liz Fraley

The lessons though, are valuable to those of you who are looking at EPUB to advance your own career goals and those of you looking to publish EPUB in your own companies. So be sure and type your questions in the question window as we go. Do it as soon as you think of a question so you don't forget what you wanted to ask later. As I said, there's a lot to cover and I'm going to try to get through everything in 30 minutes. And to do that, I'll have to wait to answer your questions until the end. Let's get started. 

[00:00:59.160] - Liz Fraley

So I've been thinking about writing a book about Arbortext for a long time, there weren't any publicly commercially available books about Arbortext. It's a very sort of insular community. And I saw a presentation by another technical writer about a book he self-published, and this was Ben Woelk up at the STC Rochester Spectrum Conference. He did a quick 80-page security book, "things everybody need to know", and that got me started. So I'll show you what he showed me and everything I learned in the process. And the result was I had two books published and available on Amazon in about six months. So as technical writers, we're uniquely positioned to be Indie Publishers, we already have a lot of knowledge, we write books, we know what it takes to publish, to print or HTML or EPUB  and we already know we have a lot of people already in our network.

[00:01:59.930] - Liz Fraley

We know indexers, we know editors, we know librarians, we know how to construct metadata. We know production experts or we know how to create those deliverables already. So we have a lot of the things that anybody who's writing or publishing already needs. We have the tools already, also, we use them all the time in our everyday work. We know how to create PDF for print. We know what it takes to create HTML and EPUB, we can even save. We even know how to use Word you know, if it comes to that and we can save the HTML on PDF.

[00:02:34.250] - Liz Fraley

We already know how to do a lot of things. So, a while back, it's more than eight months ago now, I had motivation, my customers are wanting books and writings about Arbortexts, and I had half a clue from Ben, which it turns out to be a pretty dangerous combination.

[00:02:53.920] - Liz Fraley

This was my first clue and this is what I got from Ben way back then. There's a book, it's unfortunately no longer available it was free on Kindle because, you know, Amazon want books. They want people to write. So but I've summarized-- the books not available anymore and they haven't really replaced it with anything, but these are the key takeaways from it.

[00:03:15.280] - Liz Fraley

It assumes you're using Word, right, or OpenOffice or LibreOffice as your publishing tool and that's all that's required really to get your book in and going in the first place for Amazon. Things that we know as tech providers, but as was called out in the book, use Template Styles not local formatting, right to use Head 1. Don't just format it to bullet right, It's important to use template styles. Don't forget your table of contents so that you get anchors and you get people--people are able to jump to chapter four and jump back to the table of contents around like that and the TOC in Word, OpenOffice, LibreOffice creates both the anchors and the links. Don't use blank lines between paragraphs. Also a type of thing that we all know use Templates Styles to create spacing above and below your paragraphs, not blank spaces to simulate that formatting, always inserting your graphics by reference, this is a big one, don't use the Word drawing tools, but create your graphic in professional graphic tool and then import it into the Word document as a whole so that in the process the graphic will be exactly what you want once it's converted. Also, no Headers or Footers, remember, this seems weird, but remember, you're writing for Kindle, you're writing for EPUB. There are no headers and footers right, what you have instead are the mechanics of the EPUB reader on the top and the bottom.

[00:04:49.360] - Liz Fraley

Plus, people can resize your pages at any time. They can make the font bigger so they can read it better without their glasses like me, or they can make it smaller and that changes your page layout anyway, so there aren't any headers and footers. Also page breaks, page breaks in  , in Word pre-conversion signify divisions. Divisions are big pieces of your document like chapters they're not used as a page break because remember again, no pages.

[00:05:20.860] - Liz Fraley

So if you've got a page break, it's a chapter break, it's a division break a part, a volume or some significant unit in the book right, and then the last thing that I really got from this is don't forget your front matter. You got to have your copyright's page dedication if you want it, title page and note all that kind of stuff that we don't normally have to do ourselves because that's part of the corporate template. But you got to do that all in your own book when you're in an Indie Publisher, if you have any other questions about what's in here or if you--these are the big highlights all the rest of the stuff it's not stuff we don't know. But I still have a copy of this book and I'm happy to answer the questions if you have them later. 

[00:06:04.990] - Liz Fraley

OK, so but that seems pretty easy, it's all stuff we know right, and so I'm feeling pretty good at the time and when you look at it in the bigger picture right, these are the big steps that are needed to get a book up and out the door and the green box is stuff we already know. We know how to develop outlines, we know how to author content, we know how to have it edited and incorporate those edits, we know how to publish, we can do test and verification, much of us do that already anyway. The first of, the administration and set up turns out to be a lot more work than you think and the market and selling that can be kind of daunting and is very unfamiliar for us because usually we don't do that part in our companies but you've got to do the thing of reviewers and campaigns, the sales funnel and really what's your ultimate goal for writing this book in the first place? What are you trying to get out of the process? So I'll show you what all the pieces are and there's a lot of them. This is all the beginning stuff, all that administrative stuff and the first thing you're going to do if you're publishing to Kindle first is you got to set it up on Kindle Direct Publishing and it's https://kdpamazon.com you've got to create all that metadata in advance of writing really, before you can have your book listed on Amazon and that's the stuff you'd expect, really. Title, subtitle, description contributor's, who's your publisher? Is that you? Are you going to have a DBA?  "Doing Business As" kind of press that you're going to have?  Are you limiting the age range? Does it matter? Right, you know, what kind of book are you writing? A lot of this can change based on whether you're writing a technical book or a vampire romance novel which apparently are the ones that sell best. What's your cover image going to be? Because right on that page we see that royalty plan pricing, lending.

[00:07:59.980] - Liz Fraley

Are you going to put it on Kindle Unlimited? Are you going to offer it for presale? And are you going to add DRM to your book? Digital Rights Management. These are all things you think of and figure out in advance of listing your book for sale. And it's all the stuff that you see on all of this, right, whether it's part of Kindle Unlimited,  whether you're part of it, what your pricing structure is, what the description says, what your cover image is, what all the rest of these things right,  Are you going to do this? What are the other things? Here's our pricing structure, right.

[00:08:37.330] - Liz Fraley

All of this stuff ends up as part of that metadata. Similarly, all of this stuff is part of that metadata. It'll get the file size and calculate length. But who's your publisher? What's your date? What are you aiming for? What language is it in? What categories do you want it listed in right. What are you competing against? And all of this stuff has sales, search, marketing impact later. And so you really do need to think about that when you're constructing and figuring out the book that you're writing and so and I had only intended to release my book on Kindle and as soon as I announced it and released it, my customers all said, well, when's the print book coming? Luckily, you can actually do print on demand publishing from Amazon, right from the book that you wrote and published for Kindle Unlimited. They've got a service called CreateSpace, and it does On-Demand print publishing, so you don't have to print copies in advance and hope that they sell and you've got a stack of them in your office. It'll print it when they order it. 

[00:09:43.760] - Liz Fraley

You've got it but there's more metadata you've got to figure out all the same stuff you did before. Plus, is it colored, is it black and white? What kind of cover do you have? What sales channels do you want? There's a whole bunch other metadata, and don't forget your ISBN number right, things like that. You've got to figure out and you can actually once you've got your Kindle manuscript up, it will offer you do you want to do Kindle? Do you want to add a print version? And it'll take your manuscript and they'll push it on through that way. So you don't have to do it separately or twice and you can start from either end too the CreateSpace folks will say, hey, do you want the Kindle version also? So but there's two pieces. 

[00:10:26.000] - Liz Fraley

So we're back to that print version right, how do you get an ISBN number? Well you go to Bowker in the US that's pretty much the only place that you get it. They're not super expensive you can buy a set right, usually in traditional publishing circles, the EPUB gets one ISBN and a prints version gets another but Amazon wants those two numbers to be the same so that in fact, when you show this page right, you see you get the Kindle version and the paperback version on the same page and that's part of how they're tracking it. They want to know all that same metadata that you've created twice already. They've got other things you can do not all of it is required you can upload the text of your book if you want to. I didn't, You can have--they want to know regional differences, sale pricing. They want copyright and publication dates and format and size and other pieces because they're sort of for big publishing houses. They sort of serve as a channel so that you can reach out to other publishers. I haven't pursued that in any way. This is what it looks like right. So I've got a bunch of things that I've already--I'm working 104 right now, but I have pre set up their ISBN numbers. 103 I'm working on too and it's also there, so it's already set and ready to go and then it'll be easy to work on later 

[00:11:52.300] - Liz Fraley

All right. So, cover image, cover image is book metadata. When you are going to Kindle right there's a couple of different things, you need a front cover for that page on Amazon, you also need a full set if you're going to print, the whole thing is one image, front, back cover and spine. If your book is less than a hundred pages, you don't get any writing on the spine and mine was short of that so I even know it's there, they'll take that off don't forget your blurb any quotes you have and your barcode they're of course also there's all kinds of pieces that are part of this CreateSpace will actually give you a template so that you make sure everything fits inside the template in the barcode is in the right place and that bleeds off all the way off there's no edge, not edged to the graphic you might want a rectangular one for social media, you'll want an upright one for Kindle version. You'll notice I've got one over here that--this one is shaped differently.

[00:13:04.510] - Liz Fraley

This is eight by eight and a half by eleven and this is the first book I did was five by eight it's kind of like those old vintage paperback size but I did a preview version where I offered two chapters free and so I have a cover version that's printable eight and a half by eleven PDF size and you do that kind of all in advance, any of the things that you want to have. All right, so once you've got all that administrative work done, you still have to write the book all right, you got to design the cover images but hopefully you did that already in advance when you're doing the administrative setup, you got to do your outline, right you got to develop your publishing schedule. Don't forget editing production QA time. Usually when in our companies that's kind of done for this or it's a part of that schedule. As an indie publisher, you've got to build that into your schedule you've got to make sure that you have time for the publishing set time for the QA after that, time for editing way back and incorporating those edits and if you're not careful, Amazon will decide your publishing schedule for you and I'll come back to this, because I've got a sad but funny story about it you've got to do the writing right and you got to create your graphics if you have graphics on your pages. 

[00:14:23.620] - Liz Fraley

So, then you do production and that first book that I showed you, the Kindle book that I had half a clue with it assumes you authored your book inward and all it takes to do is that upload your word document, it'll build the EPUB, it'll give you the ability to download the converted EPUB in multiple formats you can test it on all the devices you want it, it also has a simulator so you can see it on the Kindle DX or the Nook or whatever on an Android tablet you can see all of the way that it looks in various places, but you can download it and you can test it anywhere you want it probably should and then you can even edit that EPUB and upload it back so you don't have to make the changes in word and reupload the word document and hope the conversion works out. Once you have the converted EPUB, you can make changes to it and reupload it once you're happy with it. 

[00:15:19.980] - Liz Fraley

All right, so back to the other side of the publishing chain in the print productions, World CreateSpace offers a lot of additional services, stuff like you see on LinkedIn groups all the time I'll convert your e-books for this many cents a page. As technical communicators, we actually know a bunch of the stuff that they're doing right so but I wanted to talk to CreateSpace because I wasn't sure and I wanted to find out what they meant by all of this kind of additional information that they were adding, like, hey, do I really need an expert to help me go to print? And basically the big pieces that they offer are a creative team to build your cover but, you know, we can do that editorial staff, those are people in our network. 

[00:16:06.960] - Liz Fraley

We can handle that template and layout experts again, most of us know how to work on a word template and create styles and make sure those styles are applied so that's good. They've got a production experts. Those are the people who can make sure the EPUB looks perfect or make sure that the print version looks right and is acceptable for print. As one of the technical communicators, we know that we kind of do this already and it was like, hey, you know, we already know how to do print publishing, right? I worked at a company where we actually printed manuals and like big paper manuals in a box and ship them out various places. So I knew what some of those requirements were. We have the network of those people who know that stuff in our network and we already have the tools, you can create high quality, acceptable print from the right frame maker, you can do it from word if you're careful and do the right things, you can do it from half a dozen of other sources. 

[00:17:06.950] - Liz Fraley

Now and so I was thinking, hey, you guys are adding this, but I know this other part I can do that again, feeling pretty confident and here's what I had in my back pocket right, I had a completed internal copy, edited and proofed so the first manuscript was done to have been edited by several people sent out for review I'd incorporated all that. I was ready, I actually work with XML content and have a lot of expertise in authoring and styling and publishing that stuff and I had those tools I could leverage in my case it was Arbortext editor and styler so I said, hey, you know, so those of you who haven't seen it well, this is what it is that's Arbortext editor on the left and styling on the right all the layout and styling is done through a UI. So I said, hey, you know, I will take my word document, turn it into XML content and create a stylesheet and publish what I know will be acceptable PDF and so, yeah, I did I converted it to DITA because that also that's what I do and I was using it as an example of itself and I created a stylesheet that fit the trim size I'd chosen, which was the, you know, the vintage paperback size five by eight and so that's pretty straightforward to do and Arbotext comes with a DITA default stylesheet. I imported it as a module, made overrides in the styles I wanted it changed it took me all about four hours to do. Tweak, finesse, finalize the stylesheet it takes a little while sometimes those of us can't leave well enough alone and so I published the PDF and CreateSpace liked everything except my graphics.

[00:18:53.250] - Liz Fraley

Then I had done screenshots and edited with paint Microsoft Paint, which is apparently being sunsetted in the next version of Windows, but they were too blurry for acceptable print publishing. So here's the thing for graphics. If you have graphics you want PDF and since you are creating PDF that you're uploading to CreateSpace so creating PDF graphics to import into your PDF document is a good solution. TIF is the second best one and they had to be 300 dpi that's the minimum acceptable requirement for print publishing and yeah, I had to reshoot them all and there were hundreds of them but one click republish once I reshot all the graphics, I had a perfect pdf for print publishing as according to CreateSpace. There were no error messages and it was really kind of funny at the time I was thinking, you know, whoa, I can't believe  it this promise we've been asking for all of these years, it actually really works now. It's just it's surprising it took as little effort as it did. So here's what the create space does. They have a digital proof. You can also order a hard copy proof, which I did, but it shows you the front back and you can turn the pages. You can look at how it all looks. You can see if there's any error notifications anywhere. It'll tell you and take you to the page where it is pretty, pretty great.

[00:20:24.810] - Liz Fraley

The first time I ordered a hard copy, the second time I didn't. But because you know, the first time you're not sure and the second time you really do want to know. So it was really easy because I had done two things I added two things once I had this done, I had to CreateSpace on version up on Amazon, I had the Kindle version on Amazon, and then I said, hey, let's make a preview version of the book where the two first two chapters were included in and then there was a new chapter that's like, Hey, you want the rest? And I had a website where I could put that up and offer it to people. So it was easy to do. Just add another stylesheet, change the trim size to eight and a half by eleven, and really the rest of it just flowed right out and then I would say--then I was looking at the next book coming down the pipe and said, you know, I really don't want to do this inward at all right, because, you know, you can do that that way but if I'm already going to be in here, why not start here? So I had to add EPUB publishing from my Arbortext stylesheet, so I wouldn't have to. No more Word, right? None of us want Word but we do, but we don't. It required really only mild styling alterations to get the EPUB from my from my stylesheet actually and when you can't just leave well enough alone as I can't there's a program called Calibre and that's the picture of it. Calibre lets you edit and finesse your EPUB's so if you get something out and you want to be able to tweak a little bit the TOC, like for example, I had a chapter on resources and I took out from the TOC, I took out the level two heads from that section of the book because I wanted people to read the whole set of resources, not just jump to one, but it also gives you a way to QA in different environments and it gives you a way to build other formats.

[00:22:25.220] - Liz Fraley

So if you want to offer it through other channels, you can but also let you change like the metadata so the keywords for searching on the book it will let you change writing and release dates and things like that so if you want to and you're a tweaker like me, on an occasion you can open up Calibre and it'll--when you download the EPUB to test from Amazon, if they've built it for you automatically you can open it up in Calibre change to what you want to change and then upload it and it'll be exactly the book that you want. 

[00:22:57.950] - Liz Fraley

OK, so this is what Calibre looks like and you can see all the metadata pieces like the series marker for sure, whether what you want about this book section, all of this other pieces you can see all the things that you can change into the list, other book formats up there. All right, so I had the first one down and then I wrote the second one and again also I authored it completely in DITA. I use the same stylesheets I had for 101 although I changed, I created a new trim size this book is slightly bigger because it was huge at the smaller paperback size. So this one's a little bit bigger dimensions I think it's ten by ten and I also put together on Oxygen ebook and had zero stylesheet overhead. The Oxygen eBook was eight and a half by eleven. I already had an eight and a half by eleven stylesheet. So all I had to do is the writing in the publishing I was out.

[00:24:00.310] - Liz Fraley

It was really, really convenient. So once you have that kind of process, it works really well and I could publish EPUB in another click, publish, print and upload them both in and you're done. It's easier the second time around because you've been through it once. The other thing I will show you, and this is what I meant to come back to also was remember how I said Amazon will choose your production schedule for you if you're not careful? So I originally set up 102 to publish and I wanted to offer it for preorder so you can fill out the metadata and offer it for preorder without the book having been written yet but when you do that, Amazon says, OK, here's your deadline. It has to be ready for sale on that deadline, and if you miss it, it doesn't let you offer free sale again for another year, so I had one I did not make the deadline I was getting really close and I knew I was just not going to make it, so I canceled the preorder luckily, no one had purchased preorder. Is that good or bad? I don't know but now I am currently blocked, but I'm coming close to the end of my year. So you got to--if you want to do presale, it's there for you but you've got to be really careful about--I would not go for presale unless you've got most of the manuscript written for sure.  

[00:25:27.350] - Liz Fraley

All right, so CreateSpace this is what the CreateSpace Dashboard looks like, that was the Kindle side this is the CreateSpace side you can see I've got those two that are in progress already set up and getting ready. It shows you what you're offering and you can look at each one it's pretty straightforward UI actually works great and that's what it looks like all right. Where you go from there, it's really up to you, right? What was the reason for writing this book? What's the purpose behind it? What will your marketing strategy be? right and it should tie right directly back to your goal.

[00:26:06.320] - Liz Fraley

For me, this was you know, these are the first two books ever written about Arbortext, not written as part of the product documentation. There just was nothing out there at all, so we were a partner, we work with them, I've been a user for almost 20 years now right. so I wanted this was the goal to help make people more productive and work with our implementation and mentoring service right. So I could tie it to the other things that we have. But you got to ask yourself, who are your readers? Where do your readers buy your books? If they're looking for this kind of book? Where are they? Are they on Amazon? Are they on Hulu or are they just on the web searching? Like where are they that helps to decide do you put up a good reads page or do you not? Now if your people are not looking there, then there's no reason to put your stuff up there. Right. How important is price to them? How do they make that decision to purchase? What's the journey they go through? And this is all sales stuff. This is stuff that we are not really all that comfortable with because we usually stop deliver the book and the company does the rest but you got to think about where do your readers look for books that are like this? And these are the  the same  kind of questions entrepreneurs ask so you can do reading in some of the entrepreneur books, I'd have to think about the name of the one that--It's not coming to me at the minute, but there are some that are really good and you can read those kinds of books and that'll help you figure out how to start approaching these kinds of questions but once you've got it out, you've figure out your plan, right? I created a book website. I have a blog, other pages at Amazon, a goodreads that's where some of the reviews are happening there on both places but where are your advertising channels? What sales and marketing campaign you're working? I'm working up a new one right now, actually, because in response to people who are coming to me and who are finding the book and then saying, hey, but I need to know this stuff next right, and so the other one I've put in there is the last bullet, really and this comes to me from VMware, really related material and up sell opportunities. One of the things VMware does with their books, with their product documentation, actually is they'll write into their books, hey, this they'll write about a feature and even if that feature is not in an older version, that topic may appear in the older documentation and it'll be there with the caveat that says, hey, if you want this feature, it's in the next version right. So you can think about that stuff in your book too, usually that afterword or the you know, the last part of the book is, hey, tweet what you read or if you really like this, join the mailing list right, what do you want them to do? And that's part of your book also. So here's what we started with anyway I have put up a book website and you have what do you want to do? Do you want the preview? We added things like how to get the book and how to get help, right. You can click right there and book time with the author, as it were. Also, it was tied into all of the other things that we have related to Arbortext and us online. We've got a whole set of Arbortext Monster Garage videos now, it's a book series also so we sort of linked all that stuff together. 

[00:29:38.700] - Liz Fraley

There's a bunch of videos on [Knowledge Base and Forums (Ed. 2024)]. We've got a membership site, we've got a YouTube channel videos, and then you start looking at like, do you do advertising where that's that question, where are your customers or where are they looking? What kind of ad speaks to them? You don't want to just because that advertising can get really expensive really fast and you've got to make sure  you're hitting the right people so that you're not getting clicks that you're paying for that are not turning over for you.

[00:30:07.200] - Liz Fraley

 Get writing! That's really that's really the whole thing. It seems like it should be more complicated, but it's really not. It was surprisingly easy to do. I did write up a self publishing cheat sheet for all of this stuff. I think it's just a maybe a three page PDF you can get it right there at http://selfpub.single-sourcing.com and if you want to connect with me or ask me questions that I haven't answered, be sure they're typed in. We're about to get to that next but yeah, that is surprisingly easy and hey, go Amazon for making it simple.

[00:30:47.140] - Liz Fraley

All right, so let's type in your questions if you have some, in the meantime, let me tell you, while you're typing, I see one already there, but hey type some more if you want to, let me tell you what's coming up next month we've got the TPC Affinity Groups coming up soon. This is a general technical communications group it's member driven discussion group where attendees present their specific challenges on things that they're dealing with right now. We've got two of them one is general technical publication and one is Arbortext focused. We try to keep those separate because not everybody cares about both but like the technical communications one, we'll talk about things like do we keep in line linking or do we let it go and use related links? Or and in Arbortext we'll be like, hey, I'm trying to work on my Windchill workspace. What do I do to make sure I'm always up to date? right. So we try to keep that separate because we do have non Arbortext customers in the other group. But it's been really, really useful and it's completely run by the attendees next month here in the DOJO, we've got Rob Gillespie, he used to be at Nokia, I think, and he's now an Alphadoc and he's going to come and talk about topic based writing and as you can see, his description is all topics. I actually really love that he did it that way. And where do you sign up? You sign up at http colon slash slash www dot tcdojo dot org scroll down to the bottom of that page and you'll be able to sign up for any of the sessions that are coming up. We have the rest of the year planned they're not all announced, but it's going to--we're working on January already.

[00:32:36.290] - Liz Fraley

All right, thanks. Let's see what the questions are. Please type them in, I see one from one of my favorites all right, so here's the first question on the Arbortext side, did you consult with them or have contracts, legal talks with about you able to publish the book with screenshots? Just curious what is considered fair use and what would be royalty use based for other product subjects? I didn't--So, Sam, we are actually an Arbortext partner, so we have the ability to use things in context for the purposes of advancing the product. It's already in the contract we have with them. It is also, however, fair use from the other side of things. If I weren't a partner, what would happen? This is my writing and screenshots of the stylesheets I created and that's all fair game for sure all right.

[00:33:33.450] - Liz Fraley

Well, so make sure let me know if that answers your question and we can talk about that stuff later on to also see Frances very good thank you for presenting this. My pleasure. It's easy and fun and really, you know, anybody can write it. I will say that both Ben and I have noticed that the books that sell are not technical books those really don't--that won't give you a I don't have to work lifestyle, the books that sell our romance novels hands down those are the books that sell. So if you want to write that, I wish I could I just--I guess I would get bored and not do it. But like Amazon offers they have a fund for people who want to write those books and so if you do, absolutely, you can get advances and there are a publishing company right, they want you to write books, so they're encouraging people how to do.

[00:34:32.740] - Liz Fraley

All right, Sam. Yes, thank you. Excellent. I don't see any other questions. That was pretty quick I know but, you know, the video will get posted sometime soon. And I put the link in the chat box for the self publishing cheat sheet all you got to do is fill out the form on the page and it'll mail you a link to download it in the format you prefer right, because I got Calibre and Arbortext any format I want really. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Agnes. I'm glad to do it all right, I'm going to let you all go. Please come back next month because Rob Gillespie is really he's one of the big DITA users and has been doing it a really long time. It's going to be a great session all right. Thanks, everybody. Good luck. Get writing!