...A whistle stop tour!

How to Create Your First Collection:

1. Write every other day for a month. What is the theme emerging?

2. At the end of the month/2 months, find the overarching theme and eliminate the poems that don’t fit – brutally. If it’s about love, does your poem about friendship really fit? Sometimes it does, sometimes it won’t be specific enough.

3. Now do some editing with a view to the whole collection – do you use any words too much? Edit each poem to make it stand out.

4. Is there a journey? Even in a chapbook is there a start or an end? Is the ending open or ambiguous? Just like fiction books, I analyse my chapbooks like this.

Now you have a manuscript and you want to self publish it. Great. How do you do that?

First do not step foot onto Amazon Createspace until you have edited it – preferably with a proper editor but if not, your mum, your sister, your friend AND your dog. There are so many errors in self published work (grammatically, usually) and your book deserves the special treatment!

A Brief Look at Marketing:

1. Don’t do what I first did: publish the book THEN find your audience. It’s a very slow process to generating excitement and finding your readers that way. Instead, get your social media sites ready BEFORE you hit publish and every other day post an update on your book.

2. After publishing, statistics say your social media sites should be 80% content and 20% calls to action (i.e buy my book) or you will actually lose interest and engagement. So be clever, make sure you are creating or saying things that people want to get involved with, OUTSIDE of your creation. Build your name up first.

So that’s my whistle-stop tour, any more tips leave them in the comments!

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