Your Book Is The Easy Part: How Independent Publishing Turned Writers Into an Entire Production Department
by D.J. Brien
About the book
Writing the book was supposed to be the hard part. Then came the file formats. The keywords. The categories. The cover dimensions. The paperback specifications. The pricing. The advertising. The distribution decisions. The author platform. The bookkeeping. The technical support. And the peculiar experience of discovering that fixing one thing often means fixing it in three other places. Independent publishing has given writers something extraordinary: the ability to put a book into the hands of readers without waiting for a traditional publishing house to decide whether it deserves to exist. It has also quietly handed the writer most of the jobs that publishing house used to perform. In Your Book Is the Easy Part, D.J. Brien takes a wry look at what happens after the manuscript is finished—when the writer discovers she has somehow become the editor, production department, cover department, metadata specialist, marketer, distributor, accountant, customer-service representative, and occasional technical-support technician for a very small company that has exactly one employee. This isn't a manual promising the secret to publishing success. It's an account of what independent publishing actually asks writers to learn, decide, manage, troubleshoot, and occasionally surrender to. The access is remarkable. The freedom is real. It would simply have been nice to see the job description first.
What to expect
Purchasing takes you to the author's retailer (amazon.com).
Available as an ebook and in paperback.
About the author
D.J. Brien writes about artificial intelligence, writing, and the increasingly complicated business of independent publishing. Her books combine practical experience with humor and an abiding interest in what happens when new technology meets the ordinary work of writing and publishing a book. Her books include The Machine That Knew Better, Writers: How to Train Your AI, and Your Book Is the Easy Part: How Independent Publishing Turned Writers Into an Entire Production Department. From learning how to work effectively with AI to navigating the expanding job description of the independent author, Brien writes about the experience from inside it—with curiosity, skepticism, and a willingness to laugh when the machinery becomes ridiculous.
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