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Well, dear readers, the day has finally come. It’s been a long time coming, but I’m finally publishing my first novel.
You can now find Dear Maggie on Amazon— available in paperback or for your Kindle! You can read it for free on Kindle Unlimited.
For any other budding authors out there, I wanted to share my process from start to finish, in case it helps you achieve your writer dreams as well. There’s more than just this of course, but this list is a good start.
Step One: Actually write your novel.
That should be obvious, but we’re all guilty of putting the cart before the horse at times. You can’t publish something you haven’t written. Actively writing a novel takes a lot of discipline, and it can be a lonely endeavour.
I wrote my first draft of Dear Maggie during the 2021 NaNoWriMo. I hadn’t heard of National Novel Writing Month before, but as soon as I did, I knew it would be the kick in the ass I needed.
Frankly, I didn’t think I’d be able to write 50,000 words in 30 days, but I actually did it in almost half the time. When you try new things, sometimes you can impress even yourself.
Step Two: Write your novel again.
As Ernest Hemmingway totally didn’t once say: “The first draft of anything is shit.” (Seriously, there’s no proof that he said that, but there’s so much random merch out there attributing the quote to him. Maybe he did, but I’m just saying!)
You will need to rewrite a significant portion of your novel. This doesn’t mean you didn’t do a good job— quite the opposite. Writing the first draft is an incredible accomplishment. Writing the second draft is a test of your willingness to admit that you weren’t absolutely perfect the first time.
This is where you’ll want to make sure you’re following the plot you planned to follow; adding extra scenes or chapters here, cutting others there, changing names of characters or places. The world is your oyster.
Step Three: Go through your draft line-by-line.
Many leave the proofreading for the professionals, but I found it incredibly helpful to print out my entire second draft and go through it one line at a time. I’d circle any errors (of which there were many), highlight things I decided I wanted to change and added little sticky notes to tell myself where I thought I needed to expand on a scene.
After that, write your third draft! By now you should be seeing the reality of your final product slowly taking shape.
Step Four: Hire a beta reader (or five).
Beta readers are people who read your manuscript and let you know if they liked it, essentially. If you’re really fortunate, like I was, they may even do some proofreading.
You’ll want these to be people who are familiar with your genre. There’s not a lot of sense in getting opinions from sci-fi readers about your romance novel, after all.
Two warnings here: If you can avoid it, don’t use family or friends as beta readers. They can’t truly be unbiased, and you want people to give you the opinion you think the public would have of your book.
There are many groups on Facebook and other social media outlets for beta readers, but use these with caution. One of my beta readers came from Fiverr, but always be sure to check reviews on sites like that!
Step Five: Consider suggestions the beta readers make.
Some suggestions you might like, others you might not. And that’s okay! It’s your novel after all.
Step Six: Hire an editor.
Don’t edit your own novel.
I repeat: DO NOT EDIT YOUR OWN NOVEL.
I am doing the final course in my editing certificate at the moment, so I implore you not to self-edit and hit publish. By all means, scour your manuscript over and over until you think it’s perfect, but you still need to send it to someone else after.
For this, I recommend looking for a professional, established editor. Again I went with Fiverr to do this, and I was burned a bit. Given my editing knowledge, I like to think I sent the editor a relatively good copy, and she did make many corrections that I didn’t catch, but there was so, so much that she missed. I should’ve known the cost was too good to be true.
Step Seven: Design your cover.
You can hire someone to create cover art for you, or you can do it yourself! Knowing I’d be publishing my first novel and wanted to make a good first impression, I was kind of terrified.
I judge books by their covers. Don’t sue me!
Fortunately, a family member of mine who is also an author actually designs her own covers in Photoshop. I did a mock-up of what I wanted in Canva, and showed her that. She made a version based on that, and after some back and forth with various changes, I’m very happy with it!
And plus, now I know how to do it myself in Photoshop too!
Step Eight: Decide on your release date, and start looking for advanced readers.
When you have a publishing date in mind, you’ll have a due date of sorts to make any desired changes by. It’s a good time to start looking for ARC readers (advanced reader copy). There are many places to find ARC readers, but for publishing my first novel I decided to put out a call on Instagram and look for interested readers.
How many you want it totally up to you, but make sure to get enough so that you know some will post their reviews. People sometimes forget, or lose interest. I’m happy that almost half of my ARC readers have posted reviews so far, and I know more are coming!
Step Nine: Promote, promote, promote.
Marketing is very important for self-publishing. You can’t rely on a publishing house to do the work for you. If you don’t advertise your novel, no one will know to look for it.
Social media is a great tool for this; as is email marketing. Your email list is yours, as opposed to your social media account which is subject to the site’s control. If Twitter goes under, for example, your account and following goes down with it.
Use ads when you have something available to advertise. Preorders can be advertised, but personally as a reader I’d be more apt to put a preorder book on my wishlist than to preorder it.
Step Ten: Hit PUBLISH, and BOOM you’re an author.
Well, not “boom” exactly, but pretty much. Amazon in particular says it’ll take up to 72 hours for your book to be live on Amazon. I wanted Dear Maggie to be out on November 10th, so to be absolutely sure it would be, I hit publish in the evening on the 8th. It technically went live around lunchtime on the 9th, but I’m not mad about it!
Enjoy the moment. It’s a significant accomplishment! You can plan a little launch party with family and friends, host a live stream on social media, or do whatever makes you feel good about your author dreams coming true.
I hope you find this list helpful! If you have any questions about my process, please let me know in the comments below, or message me anytime!