Dream of publishing your book?

May 13, 2014Work Uncaged, Write!

Hello writer-dreamer! You’ve had this book in your heart and head for years, and you’ve finally spilled your guts on paper (or better said, in pixels and bytes). Perhaps it’s been stuck in a cyber drawer for years, knocking to get out, but your fear has kept you back. Or maybe something more practical like boring old money.

Because, yeah, it costs money to produce a book–even in today’s favorable self publishing climate. To give your book baby the best birth, you need a few things:

  • An awesome, non-dorky, professionally designed cover.
  • A substantive edit by a real-live editor whose job it is to make your book sing.
  • A line or copy edit by one of those editors who wears the grammarian hat
  • A nicely formatted manuscript, both for ebook and physical book (and those are two different formats)
  • And if you’re actually printing your books (a cheaper option, actually), you’ll need to pay for a print run. Of course you can also do print on demand, which costs you very little, but you still need the other four elements in place.

So what’s an author to do? Some options:

  • Sell a kidney (not advisable)
  • Just publish it anyway with a truly bad cover and all sorts of typos (er, remember, you only have one chance to make a first impression with your very first book)
  • Beg friends to do all the services you need for free.
  • Be independently wealthy.
  • Or crowdfund your book!

As you might remember, I crowdfunded Not Marked successfully last fall. In fact, I over-crowdfunded, enabling me to reach 251% of the goal, and providing the capital I needed to not only pay all the professionals and book printers, but also to create an audio book too (along with a study guide and extra chapters). The whole process was difficult, but also quite amazing.

My friend Thomas Umstattd who runs Author Media coached me on the campaign. He also successfully overfunded a campaign to create My Book Table. Together, we’ve teamed up to help you (applause here for YOU, the awesome author) crowdfund your book.

Only problem is, we, too, have a few start up costs to finish the product (video production, transcription, graphic design, and the like). So we decided to be meta and crowdfund the crowdfunding product. We started last week to good fanfare, ending on over a third funded. We’re hoping to fully fund by month’s end.

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Here’s the cool part for you. This product (over 7 hours of instruction, hundreds of pages of information, a magic spreadsheet to help you determine how to make your funding goals) can be yours for 67% off if you back the campaign now. Normally $149, you can get $100 off by backing the $49 level. How fun is that?

Here’s me chatting about ALL THE STUFF:

Mary Course Overview v1 from Castle Media Group on Vimeo.

Perhaps you’d like some cheerleading and hand holding for your book-funding campaign. For $349 you can get all the resources above PLUS a coaching session by Thomas and me where we’ll take you through the steps we took to fund a successful campaign, tailoring it to your specific book. (Hurry, there are only five spots for this level.)

Or maybe you’re just curious about this whole crazy crowdfunding thing works. Back us at a buck (yep, $1) and you’ll get to see the whole process unfold before your very eyes. (This is like spying!)

So, if you’ve been stressed about creating your book and giving it the best chance for success, crowdfunding just might be the avenue to make your publishing dream come true. Click below to learn more about the product and see how far we are at funding it! (Will it be 37%? 42%? 71%?)

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