Nagivating Indieworld – An Honest Review

Navigating Indieworld

Julie A Gerber & Carole P Roman

Social media guru, Julie A. Gerber and award-winning author of forty-three best-selling, independently published books, Carole P. Roman, team up to travel the winding road of self-publishing, promoting, and marketing a book. Join these two self-help experts as they share their vast store of experience in an easy to read, comprehensive guide, complete with end of chapter checklists to keep an author on track. Learn the importance of a beta reader and the value of a good editor. Know what’s needed when preparing a list for choosing an illustrator. Compare the many ways to promote your book. Find out what each step can cost and where you can save. This guide takes new independent authors from the first draft, through publication and the complicated world of marketing. Included is a directory of resources to help get there faster. Navigating Indieworld will end up being the ultimate travel guide for writers on their journey to published author. Join us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/NavigatingIndieworld

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I was gifted a free copy of this book, not for review but because I have connected with Carole P Roman through Goodreads and she was kind enough to want to help me with my writing and promoting efforts. Having read the book, however, I just had to review it.

Julie Gerber and Carole Roman have done a great job of putting together a guide for anyone thinking of publishing a novel. The focus is on publishing as an independent, as the title suggests, but they also cover, briefly, getting published through a publishing house.

The book is organised into a number of different areas that encompass every conceivable aspect of writing and publishing a novel, and each one is written in a way that makes it easy to understand what is being said. Not only are the sections clearly written, they include examples where appropriate – I found the section on blurbs particularly helpful, it’s an area of writing I’ve always struggled with but seeing the examples enabled me to restructure my blurb into something that I feel is more appealing.

Having published in the past, I knew some of what was written about in Navigating Indieworld, and would have liked a little more detail to help me in the areas I didn’t know, such as social media – this is an area I’m uncomfortable with, so more information might not help me all that much, I’m actually thinking of paying for help – but for a new author this is a book I’d recommend reading this book so you know what you’re getting into and how to get the most out of it.

Not happy with Booksbutterfly

I’m not normally one to write a post about a negative experience with a website, it’s not in my nature, but on this occasion I feel I need to.

I was dubious the moment I saw the booksbutterfly.com site, it has a lot of packages available, most of which offer a guarantee of a certain number of sales, a number that is likely to result in a profit, a small one, for anyone using the package. My scam alert started going off as a read the details of the packages, none of which gave any information on how the sales are guaranteed.

After thinking about it for a short while I decided to do some research, which wasn’t very helpful – I found an equal number of negative posts about the site as positive with the result that I was undecided about giving the site a try. Ultimately I decided, by virtue of having a bit of money that I could afford to lose (not that I liked the idea) to take the risk, figuring that if I didn’t get the indicated guaranteed number of sales I would know not to use the site again, and I wouldn’t have risked money that I might need for something more important, like food.

It didn’t take long to discover that I should have gone with my instincts and ignored the site. Communication was limited, and I had to send an email to chase up and find out when my book, Where There’s A Will, was going to be promoted for their new release package – I was told that it would be promoted over three days and that sales could take a couple of days longer to show up, unfortunately I saw no sales that I could definitely attribute to booksbutterfly (I had 2 sales over the course of a week but had another long term promotion running that might have been responsible) and when I searched for my book on the sites where it was apparently posted it was either absent or incredibly hard to find.

I have emailed the company, asking for either a refund or an explanation of why I didn’t get the sales they guaranteed. When I get a response, assuming I get one, I’ll let you all know what they say; in the mean time, I would advise against promoting with this site.