Going Indie—What I’ve Learned (So Far)—Part 4

Want to Intrude into the Land of Traditional Publishing? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Uninvited became available on barnesandnoble.com May 23.

This is the last week to get The Uninvited for free, through Smashwords. Starting June 1st, I’ll be charging $3.99. Thanks to everyone for all the downloads!

Okay, some more things I’ve learned along the way, about intruding into the land of the traditional publisher:

This might sound obvious, but clean out your e-mail once in a while! Yeah, it will get overloaded, especially once you start adding all kinds of social media and accounts, etc. Can either do it as you go, or muscle through it all at once, but also remember the “source” email accounts. I.e., if you use one email account that, say, is used to for Outlook, or forwards to other accounts/locations. YOu may clean out Outlook files, but you’d still have Hotmail or Google, or whatever you use accounts to also clear out. I haven’t found a way to do this from Outlook.
The book itself: in your Acknowledgements, Notes, etc., if there’s a family member you want to also include, make sure to make a note to include them beyond your research people you’re thanking. It can be embarrassing. In Indie publishing, you can always update that later, and re-upload. You can mitigate that in the interim by posting a blog thanking them, but sometimes, in all the rewrites, things get lost, and there’s really no one looking out for you, like an editor.
I created a press release, at http://www.prlog.org–took a long time to get “approve” e-mails, so do the account creation early, and boy, it seemed rather intricate in its process and the “user friendliness/ obviousness” of some of the process just wasn’t there, depending where you are, say, when buying “credits” to get additional umphf for your press releases. So, if you want the $49 credit beyond the basic press release, buy it early, when creating your account.
Also regarding PRLog.org, if you don’t get your e-mail verification soon, go back and select for resend. I really wanted to get this out last Friday, and almost blew my desire to send out then, because, even though it said you’d get that email in “a couple minutes,” I never saw it, came back at the end of the day, still never had it, and reselected the resend verification–ended up sending out late in the day, Don’t know if that hurt me, but it was highly annoying….
Sign up for Pinterest: quick, easy, and fun!
Sign up for About.me. Quick and easy, but wonder how useful it is (sorry, About-dot)? That might be the “About.com” stuff you always see in search engines that (IMHO) never seems to add much to my searches, so I always avoid checking out, but, hey, Smashwords recommend them, so I did it.
HARO: not so sure about this. This might be more for nonfiction, but I signed up to see if it’s worth it. Be warned, only do this and subscribe to their emails if you’re really gonna use them! You’ll get tons, and if you have more than one email account, and forward them, or have any kind of back and forth between emails forwards, this could get very busy in keeping clean. I killed all my subscriptions, but kept the account, because they just didn’t interest me, and they seemed like doubles and triplicates of the same email you got the first time. You’ll probably also get a phone and/or email from their parent company, VOCUS, looking to sell you an Internet marketing plan—not a bad thing, but that’s what that call is about, if you get it.
I tried LinkedIn again, and signed up. Have my reservations about them, because they always send such ANNOYING “come join us” emails! For each of you out there, you can try this, to shut them off at the get-go: if you don’t want to be contacted to JOIN LinkedIn, see if this link works (I haven’t tried it and if I do, my account gets terminated: go to http://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/426 (guess it doesn’t hyperlink, so copy and paste in your browser). If this doesn’t work (it should) go to LinkedIn and search their Help for “Adding or Removing Your Email from Do Not Contact List,” or get someone who is part of LinkedIn to access this help page to input your email on their “Do Not Contact” list. According to this Help Page, if you enter your info into here, you are blocked from receiving those annoying e-mails. I hope so, Please, do Humanity a favor, and send this to everyone you know, if it works, and please, let me know if it does work! Most in LinkedIn I’ve talked with about this problem didn’t even know those e-mails were “on their behalf.” They’re auto generated. I suspect that when one imports their email contact lists into LinkedIn, that’s how they get the info to auto generate their “invites.” I have not done that, just because of that thought, so I hope no one gets an auto-generated invite from me, but if you do, contact me about its (fpdochak@fodorchak.com). I might get terminated from LinkedIn, because of this, but oh, well. Do note this, however: if you associate your own email address used in YOUR LinkedIn account, your account will be terminated.
Also keep in mind, once yu create all these social media accounts, the trick is also to keep up on them, check in on them once in a while. Hey don’t run themselves, you know! :-] I’m trying to do that, but am still dealing with “collateral issues,” from all this mass-creation, so have not yet been as good as I should be in that respect. Who knows, I might even drop an account or two, depending on how useful that are [not]. But just keep that in mind when “willy-nilly” creating all this stuff….

Okay, that’s the latest, and exhausts my current notes. I really want to consolidate and put out on Slideshare.net, so look for that in the future. I don’t yet even have an account there. Hope I’ve been able to help out on some of the less-obvious tips. I must say, that things have gotten back to much better pace, since I’ve created all this stuff, just as Terry Wright said it would (thanks, Terry).