TheMartianChick
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If you don't have editing skills, there is an entire community of folks in their forum section that might be able to help or someone you know can perform that function. I live in a college town so there are plenty of English majors around. In my case, the book was finished. I designed the cover myself in Microsoft Picture It, though I could have used Publisher or some other software. I'm not a graphic artist, but I knew what I wanted. My biggest problem with the cover design was that I couldn't seem to size the pdf file correctly. After ignoring the problem and then struggling with it for a bit, I finally asked for help on the forum. One guy told me exactly what I needed to do, but it didn't seem to work for me, so I paid him $20 via Paypal to do it for me and forwarded all of the loose cover components and a wrong-sized pdf to show him what I was looking for. He sent it back in a very short period of time and Amazon accepted the file.Joel_BC said:
From what I've learned, major publisher's don't necessarily put a lot of advertising emphasis behind the books that they publish. Instead, they sort of select a certain number of winners that they expect to do well and promote those heavily. Amazon does offer an option that requires a $40 investment by the author. This option makes your book available to libraries, schools, bookstores, etc... There are a few things that you can do to promote a book because the publishing industry is changing. It is no longer the stuffy world that it once was.
Several years ago, I did a piece of fanfiction on the CBS website based on the tv show Jericho. It was quite popular and people used to send me pm's asking me to post another chapter. That was really my first attempt at writing fiction and successive chapters. If I had written a book back then, it would have been the perfect opportunity to market it to others that already enjoyed my writing style. Unfortunately for me, I only just released my first novel and have no access to those prior fans! (The business consultant and marketer in me cringes at the fact that I missed a great opportunity!)
