When Should You Publish Your Book? - a podcast by Ani Alexander

I did more than 60 interviews already and you may have already noticed that there are several things that keep being repeated. Many guests justly keep giving the same advice.

But there are also cases, when guests tell things that contradict each other. Today I would like to draw your attention on one of those cases. Many guests firmly believe that one should build an audience first and only after growing it to a sufficient size one should go ahead and publish a book. On the other side I had guests, who told that one should not wait until there is a large audience in place and it is good to simply go ahead and publish the book while starting building the audience.

I don't think that there is right or wrong opinion on this. Both seem justified. So today I will simply share what I did back when I was starting from scratch. That does not mean that you should do the same of course, but by describing my journey I hope to provide you with a real life example.

First of all, I think all of us agree that having large audience in place is the ideal situation. That fact itself makes things much easier. The book launch has higher chances for success. In that case you are in a situation where you can sell more books to your already existing readers. You can rely on your audience to spread the word about your book too.

So now, the question is what if there is no audience yet?

Spend time - and yes it takes a long time - to build it and only then publish the book you have written, or publish it right away?

Here is what I did.

When I was researching about self-publishing and started writing my very first novel Highfall I had no audience, no one, no e mail list, no following on social media. No one even knew thatI existed. So I decided that it is the perfect time to experiment. I learn best when I do the things myself, so I thought that it would be nice to put what I was learning into practice with something small. Learn on the mistakes of that pilot project and only later publish the novel, when it's completed.

So I took my flash fiction very short stories from the past and put those together. And self published my very first book on Amazon. It was the collection of short stories called Emotional Moments (Short Stories About Life).

Now let me tell you that you are in a way better position than I was back then. If you have been listening to my podcast you already know about the common mistakes newbie writers make and can avoid those straightaway.

What about me? Well I made all those mistakes and learnt from them.

I did the cover of the Emotional Moments myself and believe me everyone could tell that it was not a professional cover. I also received bad reviews because the book was not edited. I did not do a KDP Select free promo, so it was the first book with no audience in place, quite short and prices at $2.99. I guess you already guessed that the experiment did not go well.

But then I started corrected all those mistakes one by one. I got a new cover. I had the book edited. I took Cathy Presland's online course on Udemy called 

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