Conclusion

Congratulations on finishing the course about publishing!

Hopefully it gave useful advice about how to sell and market a book, whether it’s to a literary agent (to get published traditionally) or to your audience (when self-publishing). It’s all about removing the Writer’s Hat and putting on the Business Hat. To see your book as a product that needs to be marketed, and to make the (sometimes harsh) decisions necessary to accomplish that.

Rejections are part of the process. Don’t let that discourage you and convince you that there’s “no choice but to self-publish”. Most editors agree on this: the successful writer is not the “best”, but the one who is consistently productive and putting their work out there.

Keep refining your query letters and synopses. Keep refining the hook and the unique selling points of your books. Keep doing market research and studying how you can target a specific audience with your book. One day, you’ll bear the fruit of that labor. The first few books might sell zero copies, but then they’ll start selling fifty, then a hundred, then two hundred, until you’re able to live off of your writing career.

As mentioned at the start, it’s a side of the literary world that still holds many secrets for me. I’m mostly practiced with self-publishing and hope to gain more experience being traditionally published in the future, so I can relay all the lessons learned to you (in this course).

Similarly, this course originally had a chapter planned about “networking” and “relationships”. They are crucial to having a successful career. This I know and have experienced firsthand. At the same time … I’m a newbie on that front. Due to chronic health issues, I can’t regularly go to conferences or meetups, which means I barely have a “network”. So what advice could I give? Just go out there, meet people in the field, throw your work in front of them, and slowly you’ll build a network.

As time goes on, and I publish more work, I’ll be able to give even more information and share even more statistics. Stay tuned for that! (Or send me an email to remind me, in case you think I forgot. I have so many huge projects and websites that I regularly forget maintenance like that.)

Keep learning,

Pandaqi