I’m so excited today to have Fariha share an excellent guest post on her publishing journey for Poetic Justice! This is personally so useful for me as someone who would like to do the same. I hope you find some good information here! Fariha also participated last year with an interview and you can check that post out right here!
Poetic Justice is a month long event, beginning April 1st to April 30th in honor of National Poetry Month. Throughout April there will be interviews, guest posts, excerpts and other poetic posts. I hope you will follow along. To read the introductory post, you can find out more here
Topic: How to self-publish your own book
By: Fariha Khayyam
Hey! My name is Fariha and thanks to Amber for hosting #PoeticJustice and giving me the opportunity to Guest Post on her blog. My topic for this post with be “How to self-publish your own book”.
My Journey
I self-published my poetry book in December 2017 (I still can believe its been a year already!). I’d been writing my poems in the 3 years prior to when I decided to publish it as a collection. My publishing timeline was 3 months, which were divided as follows:
1) 1 month for researching possible platforms to self-publish. For my first book, I wanted to be self-published. Querying and traditional publishing never had crossed my mind.
2) 2 weeks for arranging my social media channels. This was spent mostly to write and arrange by blog, Instagram and goodreadsfor my upcoming book.
3) 6 weeks for reviewing and final editing my book. Since my poetry prices were written over a long period of time. This time was mostly spent arranging the pieces to form a conclusive flow of thoughts. After the initial arrangement was done, there were gaps in the overall flow, this is where I sat down to write more poems and arrange it to the final version which got published.
Soon enough I decided to publish on Amazon Kindle and Paperback. I thoroughly read their submissions guidelines and changed my manuscript to fit their required format. The process was well-defined and super easy! It walks through each step until the final ‘publish’ button. If you are thinking to self-publish, I recommend this endlessly.
Lessons Learnt
The two most important lessons I learnt through my self-publishing journey are the following:
1) I’m currently working on several manuscripts whenever I get the time. I’m still in favor to self-publish because so many things in the publishing journey are still in your control, as compared to traditional publishing. However, there is one huge drawback which I noticed. If you are self-publishing, you need to devote more time to marketing and book publicizing, both before and after you self-publish. If there is a way to have more reach for your book you need to take it. There are also several platforms which guarantee audience reach, but they are quite expensive. Depending on you marketing budget, you may or may not opt for those platforms. An inexpensive way is via social media, if you have a large following that’s great! If you don’t, well there are so many book bloggers who may accept your ARCs for review. (I can’t thank them enough!)
2) Another important thing is editing and proofing your book before self-publishing. There is nothing worse than noticing a typo after your books gets published (however, in Amazon Kindle you can re-submit a copy). For full-length novel it is necessary to have it professionally edited. In my case, having my book beta-read helped a lot. Mostly it was family members who did the honors. Their feedback helped me to fine-tune the poems and create the flow from individual pieces.
Thank you for reading all the best if you are planning to publish your book.
About The Poet:
While growing up reading about dragons, magic and adventures, Fariha Khayyam had always wanted to write a book. As her love for reading grew, so did her dream. She began nurturing her dream while completing her Master of Business Administration from Loyola University Chicago, Illinois. Based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, when she is not writing, she is found reading fantasy novels or spending time on her social media.
She can be found on her blog, twitter and Instagram.
Her poetry book can be found here.
Thank you so much for sharing this with us, Fariha! I thought of so much.
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