Biggest Book Writing Mistakes
Congratulations on your decision to write a book! It’s a fun and rewarding way to generate sales, establish greater brand recognition, and spread the word about your business. However, you’ll want to avoid the following mistakes when writing your book.
According to a survey of over 1,000 self-publishing authors conducted by Taleist.com, authors who invested in a professional cover design earned 18% more royalties than those who did it themselves. Does this mean you’ll experience an automatic 18% increase in royalties from using a professionally designed book cover? Not necessarily, but this survey attests to the importance of investing in a professional quality book cover.
Equally as important as using a professionally designed cover when publishing a book is hiring a copy editor. You can scan your book a dozen times and still not catch all of the grammatical errors and typos. And publishing a book that’s riddled with obvious typos and errors will send the wrong message to your audience, discouraging them from engaging with your business and reading your future books. The bottom line is that you should leave the proofreading and editing in the hands of a professional. Hiring a professional copy editor is a smart investment that pay off in the form of higher quality work, which is something that you can’t put a dollar amount on.
As the saying goes, hope for the best but prepare for the worst, holds true when writing a book. Hopefully, nothing will happen to your laptop or computer on which your work is saved, but if it does, you should have it backed up in at least one other location for safe keeping. Imagine you’ve spent the last several months (or even years) working on your book and it’s nearly done, only to lose the whole thing due to a hardware failure or virus.
To prevent this from happening, back up your work either locally (on a separate device) or online — Amazon, Dropbox and several other websites provide free and low cost cloud storage. Each time you make a change to your primary work file, update the backup file.
A fourth all-too-common mistakes authors make is overlooking digital sales. Thanks to Amazon and its line of Kindle devices, reading an e-book is easier than ever. Even if you prefer to still read a printed book, millions of readers have switched to e-books because of their lower cost, portability and instant access. You can use this trend to your advantage by publishing your book in both physical and digital form.
While this is by no means meant to discourage you from tackling a book writing project, many authors make the mistake of assuming that once their book is published, readers will flock to bookstores and digital sites and devour their book. To be brutally honest, this rarely — and I mean rarely — ever happens, even for published authors. Whether your book is published by a giant publishing house or a self-publishing platform, you — not a marketing team — are responsible for promoting your book.
What does this mean? It means you need to be promoting your book on social media, joining forums related to your book’s topic, commenting on other authors’ works, blogging or at the very least guest blog on another writer’s blog, and more. You may even need to consider giving away free digital copies of your book in return for an honest review and to build a following.
These are just a few process mistakes authors make. Click to read about writing and editing mistakes to avoid.
What kind of book writing mistakes are you guilty of making? Let us know in the comments section below!
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