Officially you’re only referred to as an author if you’ve had three publications, traditionally in the form of books for which the manuscript you submitted to traditional publishers and went on to have published. While there are obvious advantages to looking beyond the prestige that comes with this traditional route of establishing yourself as an expert author, what was perhaps meant to be the one major advantage makes for a bit of a double-edged sword.
I’m sure you can guess that this major advantage is that of being able to bypass these traditional publication channels and just head on straight to platforms such as Amazon’s Kindle print-on-demand service. Basically anybody can write a book, get it published for the Kindle, in audio-book format as well as have the physical version available via the print-on-demand feature. You can make yourself some good money too and you can even publish books under a pseudonym, which admittedly would defeat the purpose of trying to establish yourself as an expert author and set yourself apart as well.
Naturally this quick and easy availability of a public publication channel of this nature inevitably results in a torrent of books which are effectively flooding the market, so this is where the challenge of setting yourself apart as an expert author comes into play. You’re competing against so many books which were effectively ghost-written by “authors” who were only in it for the money, such as those ghostwriters who make their services of writing a 5000-word book available for $50 on platforms such as Fiverr.
While quality always speaks for itself in the end, before readers actually buy a book and read it, they have no idea of the quality it offers and your own very well written book could very well appear to look like just another one of those which were whipped up in five hours. So how then do you go about setting yourself apart?
Talk about the contents of your book
Without giving everything away, the only way to really set yourself apart as an expert author is to constantly offer a window into what the content has to offer. If it means setting up a Facebook page for it and periodically sharing quotes, then so be it. If it means creating a website for it, so be it.
The bottom line is that you have to get the word out there, both figuratively and literally and get people who have read your book talking about it as well. In the world of literature nothing works better than word-of-mouth as an effective marketing technique, so make sure it’s real quality that which you have penned down and want to share with the world in exchange for a few bucks.
Eager readers who are inspired by what you have to say will begin to quote you and recommend all your publications, whether it’s your blog they want others to check out as well or ideally your book proper they recommend or even go ahead and perhaps buy as a gift.
