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Some Things I’ve Learned From Publishing A Book (So Far!)

Victor TanPost a Comment

Newflash, becoming an author is NOT just writing a book!

It’s a (somewhat, kinda, very?) hard first step that I’ll make sure to talk about soon yes, but you know what’s harder?

Discovering your voice, learning to market, building your platform on your words 😀

For me personally, there’s definitely been a bit of a learning curve here cause… I think all of these things are interconnected?

See: Me not knowing what’s going on lmao

Maybe I’m missing something here, but I’m pretty sure that in order to market, you’ve got to learn how to actually be incredible at what you do (or kind of fake it till you make it? Lol!), and learn how to be a consistent, real, authentic, and genuinely good person who’s actually worth that marketing effort.

To me? It’s kind of like building the aeroplane while you’re riding on it, though I do think it’s cool because I’m learning a lot 😛 It’s kind of like when you learn how to ride a bike, you learn how to pedal and how to steer? You can’t just pedal only or steer only – you’ve got to do everything everywhere all at once.

Wanna come along with me on that process?

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about as I run around like a headless chicken:

  1. How do I get the book published into the right format?
  2. How to make sure that people see you and get the chance to vibe with your work?
  3. How to make sure that there’s a good mixture of people close by and far away who are constantly discovering your voice and are willing to give you a chance as you build it?
  4. How to create value, market, and build a community?

I’m not necessarily doing things in a predetermined order at the moment and a lot of things that I guess I’m doing are what we call in Malaysia very “cowboy” type decisions cause they’re done on the spur of the moment and there isn’t necessarily a process, so if I evaluate myself, I’d definitely say that one way in which I’d like to grow is in terms of learning how to plan things properly.

To give you an example of why I think that things are chaotic sometimes, Daniel Cerventus posted an innocent Wednesday what-do-you-need-help-with post in Entrepreneurs and Startups Malaysia, so I spent a good bit of time today talking to one of my ARC reviewers, only to discover that The Little Robot That Could Paint made her cry 😱 

A little bit later though, I clarified with her, and it looks like… She was touched?!

…And with that, I’m pretty happy because it looks like the message I was trying to get across in this book managed to get across! I won’t reveal why that is yet as that’s a huge part of the surprise, but I’ll just say that it should be a pretty interesting reveal for those of you who think it’s a simple book about a robot.

I cite this incident as an example of the numerous types of chaos that I’ve been dealing with ever since I started marketing this book because it led to editing the book, refining it with feedback (thank you Je Qin, Devorah, and many others!), considering the experience of the reader and even the parent who will facilitate), then repeating the whole process again to improve the experience of the product far beyond where it currently is.

The result? A bit more of an integrated product, more conversations, more awareness that what I’m doing is better than not doing it, and a little bit more confidence that I can proceed forward knowing that what I’m doing is a good thing 🙂

Oh, and I also set up Amazon ads and FB ads over the past day or so. Not sure what’s going to happen, but I’ll be doing my best to let more people know about this – pretty happy about the direction that things are going so far…

Oh, and I have a Korean exam tomorrow, RIP.

Oh well – gotta rise to the challenge 🙂 Till later!

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