Open and Optimize Your
Author Central Page

• Your book has to be live on Amazon before you can open your Author Central Page.

• You can access your Author Central page through your KDP account.

  • Log into your KDP account,

  • click on the Marketing tab,

  • then click on “Author Central” and follow the prompts.

• Complete your bio, headshot, book promo, add editorial reviews for each format.

• They’ll also prompt you to create your link. Just put your name with no spaces.

PSST: In your bio you cannot put your URL. Bummer….

Polly Letofsky is owner of My Word Publishing, a publishing consulting company that helps authors professionally self-publish their books. Her book 3mph: The Adventures of One Woman’s Walk Around the World has won 6 national awards.

If you’d like to chat with Polly about publishing—or marketing your book, please set up a free consultation here https://calendly.com/mywordpublishing/book-marketing

Authors are in near universally dislike of book marketing. And despite my years of trying to turn that around, authors still cringe at the thought of that big bad proverbial four-letter word “marketing”. When creating a marketing plan for an author, we have to consider the book’s genre, the author’s budget, and—perhaps most importantly—their comfort level. Many authors are introverts, and the thought of walking into a book club or appearing as a guest on a podcast ranks somewhere alongside a root canal—or death.

Watching authors struggle with marketing, even after we’ve handed them a carefully organized, bullet-pointed checklist of exactly what to do and when to do it, is a painful pattern. It’s a little like watching your children fall down and skin their knees day after day: you desperately want to help, but ultimately, they have to learn how to do it themselves.

Which is why one of my great dreams in life is surprisingly simple: I want to make book marketing fun.

Good luck, I hear you mumble.

I study what successful authors are doing to market their books. (Psst: they all seem to reach “success” in completely different pathways, so that’s not nearly as helpful as you’d think!). I read the marketing blogs, keep up with the latest trends, and when some shiny new marketing service bursts onto the scene, I test it on my own book first. Bottom line: there is no single yellow brick road to marketing success.

So when a self-published book exploded onto the national scene this year, I had to dig in and reverse engineer their marketing plan.

Theo of Golden is everywhere. Author Allen Levi has become a regular on podcasts, bookstores have it front and center at their entry, and the Shangri-la of book promotion—the OPRAH interview!

If you didn’t know yet, Theo of Golden started out as a self-published book. Yep. Levi didn’t spend years querying agents, he self-published his book. He was no marketing pro and didn’t hire a big agency, his cover was designed with 99Designs. So, I turned to ChatGPT and asked a simple question, “What was the marketing plan for Theo of Golden.”

Before you launch into what Chat says below, keep in mind that Chat knows the My Word Publishing services, so you’ll see him/her/it/they addressing a situation as if it’s directly to me. I made a choice to keep Chat’s response organic for the sake of this exercise. Hang on tight here, it’s a long response- but all very valid and interesting. Or maybe it’s just me being a book marketing nerd?

CHATGPT’S RESPONSE:
Theo of Golden is a fascinating case study because its rise was very different from the standard “launch hard for 30 days” self-publishing model. Allen Levi self-published it in October 2023, and the explosion came much later. It was ultimately acquired by Atria Books / Simon & Schuster in 2025. By 2026, it had become a massive bestseller; recent reporting sales well above a million copies.

What is most interesting is that there actually was a marketing plan—but it was as simple as starting grassroots, being patient, and heavily oriented toward creating word of mouth rather than buying exposure.

WHAT ALLEN LEVI AND HIS NIECE ACTUALLY DID

His niece, Aron Ritchie, essentially became the book’s marketing manager. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she did several very specific things: she contacted hundreds of people Levi already knew, built him a professional website, promoted the book in relevant Facebook groups, and made sure the cover and presentation were professional.

Levi himself has said they started with zero marketing budget and zero publishing experience. Their original ambition was extraordinarily modest: Levi said he would have been thrilled to sell 1,000 copies.

From what I can reconstruct from the reporting, the self-publishing strategy looked roughly like this:

1. Start with the author’s existing network. Ritchie personally reached out to hundreds of people Levi knew. That created the initial pool of readers rather than relying on Amazon advertising to manufacture one.

2. Get those readers talking. This appears to have been the crucial ingredient. Readers recommended the book to other readers, gave it as a gift, and brought it into their communities. The Wall Street Journal describes word of mouth as the core driver, supplemented by book-club outreach and unusually personal engagement with readers.

3. Target communities rather than everybody. Facebook groups were an important early vehicle. The initial geographic emphasis was Columbus, Georgia, and the Southeast—not a nationwide launch.

4. Lean hard into book clubs. This is a particularly important part of the story. The book is almost tailor-made for discussion groups, and book clubs became an important part of its growth. Levi’s website still provides a dedicated reader’s guide and book-club questions.

5. Engage readers personally. Ritchie was personally answering reader emails—originally roughly 10–20 per day—until the volume became so large she had to bring in help.

6. Ask readers for reviews. Levi’s site explicitly encourages satisfied readers to review the book on Amazon and Goodreads. It also captures readers onto an email list by offering a free digital download connected to the book.

7. Keep going instead of treating publication as a launch event. This may be the most interesting lesson. The book sold about 3,000 copies in 2023, according to one account, then climbed to roughly 1,000 copies a month in 2024. The real breakout came later.

THEIR MARKETING PLAN WAS NOT

Publish → Amazon ads → bestseller campaign → publicity blast → done.

It was much closer to:

Publish → seed several hundred readers → nurture them → book clubs → Facebook communities → reviews → personal interaction → gifting → recommendations → more book clubs → more recommendations → momentum compounds.

And that went on for well over a year.

There’s another very important wrinkle: the book itself had extraordinarily high recommendability. Even Ritchie acknowledges that. After describing all the things she did correctly, she told the AJC:

“It’s the book that sold itself.”

She added that she could use exactly the same tactics with another book and perhaps sell only 250 copies.

That’s important because I wouldn’t present Theo to an author as evidence that “this marketing formula creates a million-copy bestseller.” It doesn’t. Rather, the marketing created enough initial readership for an unusually recommendable book to reveal itself.

AND THERE’S A VERY INTERESTING LESSON HERE FOR MY WORD PUBLISHING

I actually think there’s something you could borrow from the Theo phenomenon for your marketing programs.

You already put considerable emphasis on Amazon optimization, reviews, Goodreads, bestseller campaigns and ongoing author coaching. The Theo model suggests putting even more emphasis on what I would call a Reader Ambassador / Book Club strategy—particularly for memoir, inspirational fiction, women’s fiction, historical fiction and other highly discussable books.

Instead of merely trying to sell the first 500 copies, the objective becomes:

Find the first 100–300 people who will TALK about the book.

Those are very different goals.

For the right My Word Publishing author, I could see a campaign specifically designed around identifying 100–200 “founding readers,” giving them easy sharing tools, systematically approaching book clubs, creating discussion materials, encouraging gifting, capturing reader emails, personally engaging readers, and then using the resulting reviews/testimonials/social proof to expand outward.

That is much closer to what happened with Theo of Golden than a conventional advertising campaign.

And the remarkable thing is that Levi’s original self-published version didn’t need to hit huge numbers immediately. It built slowly enough for genuine word of mouth to compound—and eventually publishers came looking for him rather than the other way around.

WHAT ARON RITCHIE DID CAN BE REVERSE-ENGINEERED INTO A SURPRISINGLY PRACTICAL INDIE-AUTHOR MARKETING SYSTEM.

One important correction to my earlier answer: the self-published edition did considerably better than some early accounts suggested. Theo of Golden sold 3,000 copies in late 2023, about 25,000 in 2024, and ultimately more than 175,000 copies before Atria took over publication in October 2025.

THE ARON RITCHIE / THEO OF GOLDEN PLAYBOOK

Phase 1: Build the seed audience from people who already know the author

This was much more systematic than simply announcing the book on Facebook.

Ritchie reportedly created a spreadsheet of people from the different eras and communities of Allen Levi’s life—childhood, college, his music career, volunteer work, schools, foster-care work, etc.—and contacted hundreds of them, asking them to help spread the word.

That’s an excellent idea.

Instead of asking, “Who might buy this book?” she asked, “Who already knows Allen, likes Allen, trusts Allen, or has been touched by Allen—and who might introduce this book to somebody else?”

That produces a very different launch list.

My Word version: Before publication, have an author complete a “Reader Network Map” with perhaps 10 categories: family/friends, former colleagues, professional organizations, alumni, church/community, clubs, former clients, volunteer organizations, hobby groups, social contacts, etc.

The target isn’t necessarily 500 buyers. It’s 200–500 potential connectors.

Phase 2: Give the book professional credibility

Ritchie also made sure the book didn’t look amateur. She oversaw a good cover and created a professional author website.

That sounds elementary, but it matters tremendously in this strategy because she’s asking people to recommend the book.

There’s social risk in recommending a book that looks homemade.

Interestingly, Theo itself has a remarkably restrained cover. It isn’t screaming for attention. The presentation supports the tone of the book.

Phase 3: Go hunting for BOOK CLUBS

Here’s where I think this gets really interesting for you.

At night, after putting her children to bed, Ritchie sat on her phone posting in Facebook groups trying to find book clubs around the country.

Her comment about the strategy: “Facebook is not dead.”

This wasn’t generic, “BUY MY UNCLE’S BOOK!” She was specifically looking for communities of readers.

That’s a major distinction.

One book club placement doesn’t produce one reader. It might produce 8 readers → 8 Amazon/Goodreads reviews → 2 people giving copies as gifts → another person recommending it to her other book club → 12 more readers...

That is a word-of-mouth multiplier.

And today Levi’s website has a dedicated Book Club Reader’s Guide, reinforcing how central book clubs became to the ecosystem.

Phase 4: Allen actually showed up

This is one of my favorite parts. If a book club was within driving distance, Levi would drive there and meet with them—even when it was only 10 or 20 people.

Think about the economics of that. A traditional marketer might say. “Drive two hours to talk to 14 people? That’s ridiculous.”

But a grassroots marketer thinks, “Fourteen people are going to leave feeling personally connected to this author.” Those 14 readers become ambassadors.

For authors willing to do it, I would absolutely incorporate, “Author available to visit your book club in person or by Zoom.” And I’d make that a prominent piece of marketing collateral—not bury it on a website.

Phase 5: Identify the SUPERFANS

This may be the most sophisticated thing Aron did, even though she probably wouldn’t describe it using marketing jargon.

As readers started contacting Allen, Aron tracked the interesting ones. Every few weeks, she reportedly prepared a call sheet for him titled, “Good souls to connect with” It included people such as:

• readers who had written moving emails

• someone interested in teaching the book in a course

• someone sharing it with a cancer support group

• other readers doing unusual things with the book.

Allen then personally contacted them.

That’s brilliant. Most authors treat an enthusiastic email like this, Reader: “This book changed my life.”

Author: “Thank you so much! ❤️”

End of relationship.

Ritchie essentially said, WAIT. This person is important. She identified people who were already demonstrating unusually high enthusiasm and deepened the relationship. That creates evangelists.

Phase 6: Encourage the behavior that’s already happening

This is where Theo began escaping the normal author-marketing funnel. People weren’t simply buying it. They were giving it to other people.

One enthusiastic reader reportedly bought so many copies that Levi joked the man must be throwing them out his car window.

Friends, churches, book groups, community groups and individuals began becoming distribution channels themselves.

And that’s a critical distinction:
Normal book marketing: Author → Reader
Theo marketing: Author → Reader → Reader → Reader → Reader

The second model compounds.

Phase 7: Don’t stop marketing after launch

This may be the single biggest lesson I’d steal for your authors. Look at the trajectory of Theo:

October–December 2023: approximately 3,000 copies.

2024: approximately 25,000 copies.

Then 2025 unexpectedly accelerated. Ritchie actually thought sales would decline after the 2024 Christmas season. Instead, January was stronger. Then February. Then March.

By spring, Theo suddenly reached roughly 1,000 copies PER DAY.

Even Ritchie says she cannot identify exactly what triggered the explosion.

There wasn’t necessarily one Oprah moment, TikTok video, ad campaign or publicity hit.

Hundreds of little fires eventually became one big fire.

Phase 8: Let success attract the publishing industry

This is another fascinating reversal. Allen didn’t spend years querying agents. The industry came to him.

Eventually Suzanne Gluck of William Morris Endeavor represented him, and a competitive publishing process followed. By the time Atria took over, the independently published edition had sold more than 175,000 copies.

So traditional publishing didn’t create the phenomenon, It poured gasoline on a phenomenon readers had already created.

So here’s the reverse-engineered 18-month plan I’d create

If I were turning Ritchie’s strategy into something replicable for a My Word Publishing author, I’d structure it something like this:

Here’s the part I would add that Theo didn’t necessarily have:

Amazon optimization + Goodreads + professional reviews + bestseller campaign + podcast/media outreach + email capture + reader ambassadors.

In other words, don’t replace modern book marketing with the Theo model. Layer the Theo model underneath it. I’d call it something along the lines of a Reader Ambassador Campaign

An author with 100 genuinely enthusiastic ambassadors could ultimately be worth vastly more than an author who got 1,000 anonymous Amazon impressions.

The real formula is:

Remarkable book × professional presentation × initial network × book clubs × personal author connection × superfan cultivation × patience = potential word-of-mouth flywheel.

BACK TO POLLY:
I agree with—and practice—most of the elements listed here. That said, Captain Obvious here notes that some of these strategies certainly aren’t right for every genre. Take book clubs. I do a lot of work with book clubs and can attest to their power, but they’re naturally best suited for fiction and memoir. For self-help, business, or how-to books, however, we might uplevel the traditional book club model into a book study group—which could potentially even become an income generator for the author. I have a lot to say about approaching book clubs and creating book study groups, but I’ll save that for my next article.

In the meantime, one of my biggest takeaways from the marketing story behind Theo of Golden is something I’ve been preaching for years (shamelessly patting myself on the back here): The number one way to market a book is word of mouth.

I heard a statistic early on in my book marketing days that the tipping point is to get 1000 super fans. Those super fans are your sales team. So I love when Chat talks about how to respond to an email from a fan who says they loved your book. Don’t just say thank you and hit send. Ask for the review, tell them what it meant to you that they took time out of their day to send an email. Make them a super fan.

Word of mouth starts with a book worth talking about. So don’t take shortcuts in the writing, editing, publishing of your book. Please, I beg of you, get professionals to help you. Don’t slap together an AI-generated cover because it’s cheap and easy. Don’t skip professional editing because your friend who “loves to read” offered to do it for free. Give your book every possible reason for one reader to enthusiastically hand it to another and say, You have to read this.

Not every book will ignite and make Oprah blush like Theo of Golden. But we can give our books every possible chance. That means producing the best book we possibly can, giving it a powerful marketing runway for at least two months before launch and 100 days after, and then continuing to plug away—week after week—long after the thrill of launch day has dwindled.

Because perhaps the biggest lesson from Theo of Golden is that book marketing isn’t a launch. It’s a long game. You plant seeds, nurture readers, create relationships, and give word of mouth time to do what no advertising budget can guarantee.

In the meantime, I’ll keep looking for that elusive yellow brick road of book marketing.

And if I ever find it, you can bet I’ll gladly share the map.

Polly Letofsky is owner of My Word Publishing, a publishing consulting company that helps authors professionally self-publish their books. Her book 3mph: The Adventures of One Woman’s Walk Around the World has won 6 national awards.

If you’d like to chat with Polly about publishing your book—or a marketing plan, please set up a free consultation here https://calendly.com/mywordpublishing/your-book-starts-here

An author of mine came to the table with a 200k-word memoir. We discussed that she should really try to cut the manuscript at least in half, or she’ll end up with an enormous, hard-to-market, unaffordable 700-page book.

She explained that the idea of cutting some of the anecdotes was painful because it would not tell the complete story, and she’d feel disloyal by ditching them.

So I felt compelled to share a writing tip that an editor tutored me through in a similar situation.

To recap: I spent five years walking around the world. Every single day there were enough adventures and new perspectives to fill a book. So to cut that 5-year journey down into a nicely packaged 300-page book was a heckuva challenge.

When I proudly cut my initial 1300-page book down to 650 pages, I would have sworn there could not possibly be one more comma coming out of that manuscript. Then an editor said to me, “If an anecdote in your memoir does not bring the primary story forward, then get rid of it.” “Get rid of it?! Are you crazy?! It’s like giving up one of my children!”

The editor continued. “You’re not being disloyal to these stories by cutting them out, they just have a home elsewhere.”

She explained that we’ve got to keep the book readable, so while anecdotes no doubt bring out a nice burst of color, when there are too many random anecdotes stacked on top of each other with no connective tissue to the main story, then they become lost. “It’s a better idea,” she said, “to repurpose them. Share these little treasures at a book club, in an interview, or a speaking engagement.”

When I echoed these wise words to my author, I had a flash of brilliance. “Hey!” I said, “Why don’t you start adding a series to your Substack called, Stories from the Editing Room Floor. All those pieces that got the editor’s cut could be repurposed in your book marketing.”

Then, with an ensuing flash of brilliance, I thought Why the heck am I not doing that?

So, while my Substack blog is meant to focus on writing, publishing, and book marketing, I thought it would be fun to occasionally share some of the stories from my own book (3mph: The Adventures of One Woman’s Walk Around the World) that were victim of the editor’s cut.

This first cut takes place when I’m on the home stretch of my 14,124-mile walk. In this scene, I was walking back into my hometown of Minneapolis, and there was something very special I had planned on doing for years.

October 19, 2003 TRENT
MINNEAPOLIS, MN—

When I was five years old a new family moved in down the block. I jumped up and down asking Mom if there were any kids in the new family. She said yes, as a matter of fact there was one about my age, a little boy.

Perfect!

I scooped up my red ball, tucked it under my arm and marched down First Avenue like the self-appointed queen of the Neighborhood Welcome Committee.

There he is, I thought, that must be him. I’d never seen anyone like him. He had light brown skin, bright blue eyes and fluffy curly hair that grew north. He was bouncing a little rubber ball against the curb playing Jax—bounce, scoop, bounce, scoop.

I walked right up to the little boy with the fluffy hair and ventured those two words that start friendships all over the world, “Wanna play?”

Trent and I became inseparable. Two of a kind. Joined at the hip. We had our favorite trees to climb and garage roofs to jump off. We would swing high, higher, highest on the Nielsen’s swing-set and jump off at top speed, then fight over who jumped the furthest.

We rode bikes, played kickball, and had secret hiding places known only to the two of us.

We had sleepovers and would get up at 3am to watch out the window for burglars. If there had been a burglar on First Avenue from 3 to 3:05 he would be busted, and we would be heroes.

And we laughed. My clearest memories of childhood are Trent and I in a gut busting fetal position laughing our way to tears. Like the time on Stevens Avenue when the brakes went out on his bike. He hit a curb so fast he was thrown high into the air tucked in a full somersault over the handlebars and landed on his feet like an Olympic gymnast. Well, good golly gosh, you would’ve thought it was Comedy Central the way we rolled around Stevens Avenue howling for hours at the hilarity of near death.

Ladies everywhere would stop and fuss over the cute little boy with the northbound hair and blue eyes. “Oh my,” they’d say, and pinch his cheeks. “Look at those eyes, never seen anything like them.” Then another lady would put her groceries down, grab a handful of the fluffy curly hair and coo over how darling he was. “Such a cute boy, Cindy, won’t he be a lady killer ha ha.”

And there I was, by all accounts a goofy looking kid—not looking for sympathy here, that’s just the way it was. I had no front teeth and was Cosmo’s permanent Fashion Don’t with light blue cat-eye glasses and a pixie hardo. During the daily dose of Trent-fussing, I would regularly get shuffled to the back of the crowd. But here’s the thing—I don’t recall every being offended, just annoyed. Being ugly is one thing, getting nixed of tree climbing time is quite another.

When we were about 9 or 10, we became obsessed with getting a yellow Chiquita Banana football. You had to collect 10 Chiquita Banana stickers, send in your $2, and in four to six weeks eternal joy would show up in your mailbox.

First we went down to the Piggly Wiggly produce section and stole all the stickers off the bananas. Then we washed cars, raked leaves, and rummaged through the crevasses of couches and car seats until we scrounged up our $2 plus shipping and handling.

Four to six weeks may as well be a century when you’re 10. We waited and waited. Every day after school we would race to our mailboxes to see if our yellow footballs had arrived. And every day there was nothing. We swore once that yellow Chiquita Banana football arrived our lives would be complete, and we’d never want for anything else as long as we lived.

The day our footballs arrived was better than Christmas. There was a package of my very own. Addressed to my very own name. I got to open it all by myself. Better yet, inside was a bright yellow Chiquita Banana football that looked even better than in the picture.

I called Trent and yelled into the phone, “I GOT MY FOOTBALL!”

”ME TOO!”

”MEET YOU HALFWAY!”

We tore out of our houses and spent all day long tossing our Chiquita Banana footballs high and far, down the block and back again. It was the best when both yellow footballs flew through the air at the same time crisscrossing at their peaking arc.

We punted across the Strandlund’s front yard and dove for spectacular one-handed catches. We played on the Nielsen’s swing-set, catching and kicking from the swing. Trent would catch them behind his back and between his legs and that would make me laugh so hard I’d yell, “Do it again! Do it again!”

We played until night fell and couldn’t see the yellow footballs in front of our faces.

When Trent and I made the transition into high school, maturing interests took us in separate directions. I joined the gymnastics team and became less interested in neighborhood football and more interested in boys. We were growing up I guess, and slowly drifted apart.

Fast forward to May of 1999, I was in Vail busily preparing to depart on my big lifelong dream to walk around the world, when I got a phone call. It was a mutual neighborhood friend from Minneapolis. She said she had some bad news. This morning, she had seen an obituary in the newspaper. It was Trent. It said that he had lost his long battle with AIDS and the funeral was the next day.

I hadn’t seen Trent since probably 1982, but it still hit hard. I had fleeting urges to hop on a flight that night and show up at the church the next morning. I would’ve loved a chance to meet his friends in adulthood and maybe even tell them what he was like as a kid. I would tell them how we stayed outside until all hours in the freezing Minnesota winter days building snow forts until our fingers and toes were frostbit, and in the summer how we dug holes around my backyard to bury “time capsules” filled with our treasures of the day. We were quite convinced that people in a hundred years would dig up our time capsules and marvel at our lives in the 1970’s. I would tell his adulthood friends how we laughed about what we might look like when we're “really old, like 18!,” and how all the girls at Field Elementary would want to beat me up because they thought I was his girlfriend, so I would skip out early and run home.

I wondered what Trent looked like in his later years and who he became as an adult. I promised that when I walked through Minneapolis, I would look up his family and find out.

So here I am, four and a half years later in Minneapolis, trying to find Trent’s family.

I looked up his mother, to no avail. I looked up his father, John Brunier, but I hadn’t seen Mr. Brunier since I was 7, so he’d never remember me.

I practiced my phone call. Maybe I could say, “Hi, listen, you won’t remember me, but I’m an old friend of your son Trent. I was the ugly kid who tossed around Chiquita Banana footballs into the night. I know he’s passed away but I’m looking to discover who he became as an adult.”

Good enough. I picked up the phone and heard the ring on the other end. A woman with a very pleasant voice answered. I asked if John Brunier was there. She said no, you just missed him, but he’ll be back in a few hours.

I made the launch. “Oh. Well, umm, this is an old friend of his son, Trent. I know that Trent has passed away but I’m in town for a few days and am trying to make contact with some of his family.”

She didn’t hang up, so I continued. “My name is Polly Letofsky, Trent and I grew up together on First Avenue.”

She leapt right in, “Yes, Polly! We’ve been following along with your big walk. Goodness, that’s quite a trip!”

”Oh!” I said, taken aback. And thrilled.

”We were hoping to connect with you when you got to town.”

What a fabulous turn of events.

John and the woman with the pleasant voice, his wife, Liz, picked me up for brunch the next day, and straightway I knew that face like I had just seen it yesterday. He leapt out of the car before it stopped and greeted me with a bear hug that would’ve fooled passersby into thinking maybe we’d seen each other at last once in the last 35 years.

We met Todd too, Trent’s older brother, and we all sat at Vic’s Cafe bursting with enthusiasm trying to catch up on the decades since those formative years.

John showed me photos of Trent through all the ages. Trent as an adult that I couldn’t recognize at all. I couldn’t find the young face that I spent all those early years with inside that handsome mature face with chiseled cheekbones.

Then there were a couple photos of the Trent that I knew—the 5-year old, the 7-year-old, the 10-year-old, the fluffy northbound hair, that’s MY Trent.

They showed me a photo of him at age 3—the year before I met him on the curb that pivotal day—and he was a cutie! Even then he had straight white teeth, bright blue eyes, and gorgeous light brown skin. Looking at that photo today I completely understand why all the ladies would fuss and pinch and coo.

I gurgled over the photos asking questions and sharing stories. Did he become shy and soft spoken? Was he outgoing? What were his interests, his hobbies? Did he continue to laugh a lot? Did he develop a healthy affection for yellow?

There’s no one that defines my childhood more than Trent, and don’t doubt one little bit that he’s one of those guardian angels that has kept me safe all these years on the road. When I meet people who whine and whimper over the woes of their childhood I give a happy nod, even a mischievous wink, to the little boy with the bright blue eyes and the hair that grew north. Cheers to you, my good friend.

Polly Letofsky is owner of My Word Publishing, a publishing consulting company that helps authors professionally self-publish their books. Her book 3mph: The Adventures of One Woman’s Walk Around the World has won 6 national awards.

Self-published books are the sole property of the author, and all sales proceeds belong to the author. So the pros of independent publishing are easy to line up:

1. YOU MAINTAIN 100% OF CONTROL
It can be scary to take over the reins and take “complete creative control,” but if you get a publishing coach to keep you in the right direction, and hire a professional editor, cover designer, etc., you’ll realize quickly that this is the best way to go. In a big traditional house, there are teams of people making decisions about your book and you get very little say – if any. After the hard work you’ve put into your book, this can be soul crushing.

2. YOU KEEP 100% OF YOUR RIGHTS AND ROYALTIES
   One of the most important steps you can take when self-publishing is to make sure you maintain your copyrights. But you should also be fully aware of the lesser-known sales and distribution rights. With little exception, the company that owns the ISBN on your book owns the sales and distribution rights. That means, all the sales go through that company and you’ll get your share of the royalty every six months. So when you are publishing independently you want to open your own publishing company—even if it’s just your name—at which point you will acquire your own custom ISBN.
   
   One of the biggest mistakes an author can make is to “self-publish” with one of those online publishing companies. You think it’s nice to have that publisher logo on the back of the book? With a “subsidy press” that is often doing way more harm than good. They don’t have a good reputation, and a number of book review services will not accept them. Generally speaking—because all of the companies within this model have variances—these companies let you buy your own book for a 40 to 50% off the retail price. And your royalty usually sits around 70% of the net receipts—which adds up to about $3.60 for a $15 retail book. You should get 100% of your royalties! Why would you agree to having someone else making money off your book? It’s just not necessary in today’s world.

   ---

3. YOU’LL MAKE A HEAP MORE MONEY

   A study was taken a few years ago with the IBPA (Independent Book Publishers Association) to follow the progress of 500 authors of a similar genre over the course of five years. Half of the authors were published through a traditional publisher, and the other half started their own publishing company—true independent publishers. At the end of the five years, each author had sold about 5000 books. So let’s do the math:

   
   Generally speaking (there are small variables from publisher to publisher of course) the deal with a traditional publisher is your royalty falls between 6.5-8.5% off the wholesale price. If the retail price of your book is $15, then the wholesales cost is roughly $6.75 (55%). Multiply that by a median 7.5% and you make roughly .50 book.
   
   If you self-publish your $15 book (250-page book that costs $4 to print on Amazon’s KDP), your profit margin is $11.15 when you hand-sell it direct to consumer. Your royalty on Amazon is $5. That’s at least ten times more royalty.

4. YOU HAVE FLEXIBILITY: NO RED TAPE
   There are a number of reasons you’ll want to make a revision in your book. Of course there is the annoying typo, but moreover, what if you get an endorsement or testimonial from Oprah herself and want to put it on your cover? You can also use your book as a sponsorship opportunity. For example, in lieu of a speaker fee, you can get a company to buy a book for all attendees of a conference and put their logo on the cover.
   
   When you publish your own book you get to make these decisions. You can make the negotiations. And pronto. If you have to wait for the red tape monster in the corporate publishing house you will more than likely lose the deal.

5. REVISIONS ARE AT VERY LITTLE OR NO COST
   If you win an award, or get an endorsement, you would have your cover designer embed them into the cover. Equally, if you have a typo to fix on your interior you would ask your interior formatter to make that revision. Most cover designers or interior formatters include a revision or two in their price so it shouldn’t cost you much of anything. If you’re using Amazon’s KDP as your printer and distributor, they don’t charge anything for uploading new files. (NOTE: Ingram Spark does have a $25 fee per revised file every time you re-upload after the first 60 days of a book’s initial publication date.)

6. YOU HAVE CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS WITH YOUR SERVICE PROVIDERS
   It’s all very tempting at the beginning of your publishing process—amidst the overwhelm of it all—to think “I don’t want all the control. It’s too overwhelming. I’m sure the cover designer and editor know what they’re doing and all will be grand.” Which is to say, you have no problem handing over all the control. Until you do.
   
   Knowledge is power, and when you start to learn what your options are, naturally you have an opinion. In the big “trad” houses, those choices are not yours. You will work with your editor closely, but it’s usually in the contract they they get “last edit”, which is to say, you can give your opinion but they get the last say. When it comes to your title, cover design, layout design, you have no control. The author is never on the design team. When you work with a traditional publishing house they are investing in you by buying your story, your copyrights. So they are protecting their investment by doing what they feel is best.
   
   When you self-publish, it is best that you get a Publishing Coach, aka a Publishing Consultant, aka a Book Shepherd, aka a Project Manager. Your Publishing Coach will manage your entire project, essentially doing everything a publisher does but they maintain no ownership. At the risk of sounding too self serving—because that’s what we do—using a good Publishing Coach will save you gobs of time, money, and aggravation. Dare I say you don’t know what you don’t know, and that gets you into trouble. (It happened to me, which is why I now do what I do!)
   
   A good Publishing Coach will lead you to the right professionals for your unique story, budget, personality, and timeline. They will lead you through all the minutiae: advice on distribution, printing, copyright law, what makes a good title, and details you didn’t know were details!
   
   You want close relationships with your cover designer, layout designer, and it’s imperative to have a very close bond with your editor. You should feel comfortable enough with each service provider to ask questions you might deem silly (they’re not!) and call them anytime and get a response. You simply don’t have those relationships when someone else owns the copyrights.

   

7. TIMELINESS
   A statistic that is very real these days is that your chances of getting picked up by one of the big publishing houses is under 1%—and less as each year passes. You’ve got to not only have a big following already, but you’ve got to have a book they’re looking for. Having a fabulous book with all 5-star ratings on Amazon is something to brag about, but if it’s not a genre the big houses are looking for, they’re simply not interested.
   
   With that said, even if you magically got an agent tomorrow, you’ve got to work with that agent to draft a proposal—which is considered your social proof and marketing plan, proving that your book is a good investment for them. The agent will turn around and use that proposal to sell your book to a publisher. That alone takes upwards of 6 months.
   
   Then, let’s say, magically your agent got an offer right away. The reality is that, more often than not, your manuscript sits at the house for a year-plus while they think about it. (My words, not theirs.) Let’s say, then, that magically, they move forward with your book. To put it through editing and layout would take upwards of two years. (Yes, we have all heard about the big stars that get their book out in two months, but that is the exception.)
   
   Bottom line is that to publish through a traditional house, the timeline would be on average, 3 years.
   
   In the self-publishing world, to put your manuscript through 3 editing rounds, layout, cover, publishing, and into distribution—using the same professionals that have come from the big house world—takes on average 6-8 months.
   
   Consider the two-year difference for publishing, add the money you would make in those two years when you could be out selling your book, and you keep the royalties, and have to ask yourself, what’s the point?

Publishing is a very different world than the one we grew up in. It’s rarely the world of big advances and national book tours anymore. But due to today’s reality that there is no longer a gatekeeper telling us if our content is good enough to get out into the world, I want you to realize this is the best time in history to be a writer.

My dad was a writer. My mom was a writer. My brother was a writer. And I wasn’t. It wasn’t a conscious rebellion, but more likely a lack of confidence to have to compete with such talent.

In college I got a C on my grade-defining creative writing project, which confirmed in my little head that the writing gene did not get passed down to me. I was fine with that; it wasn’t a passion anyway.

Years later I was working at an enormous ad agency on the east coast when the Creative Director himself stopped by my little cubicle. He said he had noticed some of my pithy notes to the creative team and thought I had quite the writing talent, and would I be interested in helping them write an ad campaign for McDonalds. I gasped and ran for my life. What on earth was he talking about. He had the wrong person.

And so it was. Any writing skill that was hiding inside me refused to come out and be seen.

Fast forward a decade. In 1999 I left my home in Colorado to pursue a childhood dream to walk around the world. My timing was particularly lucky as the computer age had just started to sweep the planet – along with cell phones, digital cameras, the internet, and these things called websites. Because my GlobalWalk was a fundraising effort, a highly skilled web designer volunteered to design a website for me. (The first of all my friends to have such a thing!)

To keep in touch with my friends and family about my life by foot on the road, I started to write daily journals (The word “blog” didn’t exist yet) and sent them to my webmaster to post. On the road I discovered a new-found freedom with writing. Free to be myself. Free to make up words. Free to choose the silliest of topics and not giving a hoot if anyone understood “my angle.” I wasn’t getting graded on it and I wasn’t being paid to write about someone else’s product. It’s as if the right side of my brain opened up and came pouring onto the keyboard.

And a following began to build.

One day while walking across the high desert plains of Arizona, with nothing but sand and sky before me, my dad called. He marveled, “How did you learn how to write like this?!” Cautiously, I responded, “Like what?” “Your stories are silly, yet gripping, they pull me in from the first sentence and you always wrap them up in a nice little bow at the end. How did you learn how to do that?” I wanted to tell him it’s because I’ve been watching TV sitcoms my whole life but didn’t want to ruin the moment.

Three months later when I walked into Los Angeles – where Dad lived – I noticed a travel writing contest on a website. The topic was simple – to write about a unique experience you had with a foreign culture, and it couldn’t be over 900 words. I chose to write about an experience I had walking through the Ute Indian Reservation in southwest Colorado and was invited to a Sweat Lodge Ceremony. It was a comical, fish-out-of-water, near-death story, that I couldn’t get under 903 words. I handed it over to Dad, the writing master, the nationally renowned word king, to fuss with it. He did. But a new confidence swept over me when I realized I liked my version better. So I tweaked and poked and maneuvered and squeezed my version into 899 words.

Boom! I won the grand prize of that competition – a cruise down the coast of Costa Rica.

As the miles and years continued, I walked across 22 countries, 4 continents, and over 14,000 miles. Every night my fingers pounded the keyboard in stream-of-consciousness thought as if this little computer was my confidant, my shoulder to cry on, to bitch and moan with no care of proper punctuation, arching storylines, or God forbid, those dangling participles. Whatever those are.

It took me five years to walk around the world, and six years to write the book about it. When I got settled back home in Colorado I dove right into a bustling American life of two jobs, friends, gym, neighbors, etc., and found it hard to sit down and write anymore. One night dad called and asked how the book was coming along. “Dad, can’t I just get a ghostwriter to write it for me? I’m busy.” Silence filled the cell towers from Colorado to Los Angeles, and finally I heard a pained whisper, “No. No one can write this but you. It couldn’t possibly have the same voice. You have to do it.”

Of course he was right.

Writing, I’ve discovered, is a discipline. You’ve got to put time aside, put it in your calendar as a time blocked event. It’s not like when I was on the road and looked forward to my nightly writing because, well, there was nothing else to do.

When Dad was diagnosed with liver cancer that threw me into a writing schedule. I would send him chapters to fuss and giggle over. He gave me direction and advice, and our writing bond was back in swing.

Dad never did see the final version of my book. But he would be proud to know it went on to win 6 national awards.

Sure, that writing gene was probably swimming around the gene pool, but I knew it was something else. I was set free. Free to be myself. Free to be comfortable with my own unique voice. Free to not give a hoot. Free to write like no one was reading. And I still have no idea what a dangling participle is.

Polly Letofsky is owner of My Word Publishing, a publishing consulting company that helps authors professionally self-publish their books. Her book 3mph: The Adventures of One Woman’s Walk Around the World has won 6 national awards.

Book Marketing is usually the toughest part of your publishing journey. That’s the reality. Writers, unlike businesspeople, seem to be extremely uncomfortable marketing themselves, yet they don’t have the funds to delegate the tasks to someone else. Add the fact that you can rarely see book marketing results in real time and the whole thing becomes demoralizing.

So how do you stay motivated? Let’s start with this pep talk.

1. Ask yourself what success means to you – and remember it!
Your vision of “success” could be to win an award and therefore be recognized as a great writer. It could be to have your book displayed in the local bookstore, to change people’s lives, to get your production money back, or to make a living as a writer.

Now you may be thinking, but all of those are my goals. If that’s the case, it’s vital to pick your main goal and list the others in order of priority. This approach allows you to focus on achieving one goal at a time. We find that when authors try to succeed at all the goals all at once, their marketing efforts get skewed, and they find themselves shooting arrows in several directions instead of targeting the focused few.

When you reach your initial goals of “success,” it’s a good time to re-evaluate and set new goals, but always remember these first goals and remember that you’ve reached them.

2. Set realistic goals
When people ask, “How many authors make their production costs back?” the answer is, “Whoever tries.” The fact of the matter is that because authors generally hate book marketing, they expect too much from too little effort. Discouraged, they throw up their arms in frustration and cry uncle.

It’s important to set realistic, achievable goals. To get started, think about marketing in three levels:

1. The first level begins with the people in your immediate circle: friends, family, colleagues, neighbors. You can do this by hosting a book launch party and during your program ask for what you need. This is your tribe, and they want to help. You’re asking them for Amazon reviews, connections for speaking engagements, book clubs, podcasts, and any other ways that help spread the word about you and your book.

2. The second level of marketing is the six degrees of separation: everyone that Level One knows! You can reach these people through your friends’ introductions, social media, book clubs, classes, author showcases at your local library, even speaking engagements at the local Rotary Club, Lions Club, or churches.

3. The third level of marketing includes everyone else who would be served well by your book and its content, but you have no access to them. You can reach these people via podcasting, guest blogging, author ad campaigns, and putting your book up on book promo sites.
   

   It’s important to understand that launching a book is not just the first week out but should be ongoing. Before the age of print-on-demand and self-publishing, a book had a two-year shelf life. We’re now in an age where your book’s life can span decades. Take advantage of it.

3. Pair up with a “Book Buddy”
Motivation is largely more attainable with a support team. Even if it’s just one other person who you meet with regularly. A Book Buddy is another author who is in the same timeline as you or shares the same vision for success. It doesn’t have to be the same genre, but it should be someone who released their book near the same time you did. A Book Buddy is someone to meet with for accountability or one-hour marketing binges, and to brainstorm with.

4. Book Marketing Mastermind
You could uplevel your “Book Buddy” into a small group of authors. A Mastermind is a small group of people who meet regularly (say, once a month) to support each other, learn from each other, problem solve, share experiences, offer accountability and general pumping up. Marketing can feel overwhelming, and a support group is a great way to alleviate that—and, dare I say, make marketing fun.

5. Be honest with yourself as to what time commitment you can give to your marketing.

Let’s say you can commit to one hour three times a week. Maybe, instead, you can devote a one- or two-hour stretch to your marketing on Saturday mornings. Block out that time in your calendar and keep it blocked. Whatever you can commit to, keep at it consistently.

Your first 90 days out from launch will take more commitment than the second 90 days. But your time commitment for marketing should be on your calendar for at least one year.

6. Lay out your marketing plan in your Book Marketing Calendar
First things first! Lay out all your marketing tasks in your marketing calendar. Please download this free 6-month marketing calendar, www.BookMarketingCalendar.com, (Get your Book Marketing Calendar here) and as you go through this Buzz book, list all your tasks into this calendar according to your time commitment above. Then, when you sit down at your committed time, you’ll know exactly what you’re doing.

NOTE: The Book Marketing Calendar is a template only, so your very first day’s task is to fill in dates and tasks to suit your time commitment. Remove, revise, and add as your target audience, budget, and comfort level allows.

Subscribe now