Every Book Author Needs a Team

 

By Terry Whalin @terrywhalin

In the publishing community, there is an explosion of self-publishing. Author struggle to build reader connections or a platform--click for an explanation). They struggle to write a proposal which catches the attention of a literary agent and a traditional house. They decide to follow the bandwagon of others and self-publish. What they don’t consider is that because they self-published, they have established a visible sales record for others in publishing to see through bookscan. This record could affect the response from agents and editors when they pitch another book project. 

One of the greatest challenges for those who self-publish is what actions to take when something goes wrong. Where do they turn and what sort of extra time and money do they have to spend to fix this situation? In this article I want to tell a couple of stories and give you some reasons for having a team.

The Value of a Team

As an acquisitions editor, I work with my Morgan James Publishing authors until they sign and return their contract. At this point, other colleagues take over the responsibility for producing the book. I’m still available to my authors but often I don’t hear from them unless there is some issue.

One of my children’s book authors reached out to me about the pre-sale information in her book listings had some misspellings. I wasn’t sure how to fix this issue so I reached out to a colleague and asked for her help. She quickly pinpointed the issue was in the metadata. This technical information is data that our team creates about the book then disperses it to a series of online bookstores throughout the world. With the work of producing almost 200 books a year, one of our team members works on metadata full-time. In a short amount of time, this team member fixed the metadata and showed us her revision. When she sent the revision, she told us that it would take several days for this information to populate the different bookstores and if it wasn’t resolved in three or four days, to reach back out to her again. The revised metadata corrected these misspellings so my author could promote her book on these bookstores without concern about the incorrect words for her book. 

It took me a bit just to explain what steps we took to correct this metadata error. Now imagine if you were self-publishing and trying to fix it. The task would be huge without a team to help you.

I want to tell you about another Morgan James author I connected with during a writers’ conference. With a lot of distress, she told me about a series of typos in her book. This author paid an editor to fix these errors yet they were in her printed book. I empathized with her situation but wanted to know the details before I did anything. I asked this author to send me a copy of her book and mark the various errors in her book. 

When this author followed through and mailed a print copy of her book (an important part of the process for every author--follow through), I learned she had 15 errors in a book that was published several years ago. Armed with these details I reached out to my Morgan James colleagues to see how we could fix these errors. When this happens, the author normally pays for these corrections. For this author, I learned we didn’t have a lot of copies in the warehouse or bookstore. Also this book was agressively priced when released and the price of paper has increased so it would be a help to the author and Morgan James to raise the retail price on this book. The typos could be fixed in this process. I gathered the necessary internal documents and sent them to this author. It took a few weeks but she filled out the paperwork and returned them. Now these corrections are in production along with other details such as the raised retail price. 

I told this story for several reasons. Every author needs a team to help them with the details for their book. It takes cooperation from multiple people to fix these situations. At the end of the day, the author will have positive feelings about Morgan James and her book to be marketing and promoting it (which every author must do no matter when your book was published). At the conference, this author told me she was writing a second book. Before these errors were fixed, I dolubt she would have considered publishing again with Morgan James but now hopefully she will give us another opportunity to work with her. The relationship and the details are important. 

Finally, every author needs a champion inside the publishing house to help them navigate the relationships. I’ve published where my champion (acquisitions editor) has left the company. Within publishing we call this book an orphaned situation (not where any author wants to be with their book). Without a champion, many details on that book were lost and it did not succeed/ sell. 

As a book author, do you have a team? If not, how can you build or find one? If you want to explore working with Morgan James Publishing (follow this link because my contact information is at the bottom of the second page). I look forward to your comments and insights.

Tweetable:

Every book author needs a team to help them handle the publishing details according to this prolific editor and author. Read the stories and get some action ideas.  (ClickToTweet)

A key part of the writing life is a word I don’t really like but do: the discipline of consistently writing. A blog is an important part of this process for me. Many authors have an unrealistic idea about the details of publishing. 10 PUBLISHING MYTHS is a practical easy reading book to help you. Get my decades of insights in 10 PUBLISHING MYTHS for only $10, free shipping and over $200 of bonuses.

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