Don't Waste Your Money
Test your book before you publish
Self-publishing is expensive.
All my brothers and sisters out there making books—you know.
At a minimum you’re paying for books to be printed. That’s thousands of dollars.
You’re probably paying for illustrations, too. That’s hundreds and thousands more.
You might also be paying for editors, formatting, cover design, distribution, marketing and who knows what else.
In other words, self-publishing is expensive.
But here’s the silver lining: You’ll make all of that money back—and more—if your book is good and you know how to sell it.
We’ll talk about selling another day. Let’s start with knowing whether a book is good. How can you know?
First, let me tell you about 2 incidents that made it crystal clear for me that testing your book is important:
Incident 1
My first book, Dance and Play the Animal Way uses a narrator named Bibble. On every page the kids learn a new animal dance. Bibble pops in 3 times to shake up the formula and provide some contrast. I thought he was a fun addition.
Pretty smart, right?
In reality, after the first couple of readings I skipped the narrator pages completely. They felt like an unnecessary interruption of the kids fun—so much that in the 2nd edition of the book I dropped the narrator completely.
Incident 2
My current book is written. The illustrations are sketched, but not finalized. Because of the incident with Bibble from Dance and Play, I decided to read the book to my daughter, who is the perfect age for it.
I’m so glad I did.
When you read a book out loud to a kid you can feel their attention, see their reactions and ask for feedback. Here’s what I learned. The book was wordy and slow to get started. In other words, the beginning was boring.
Now I know the pacing is off and I can fix it.
The bottom line: You spent a lot of time on your book and you love it. You want kids to love it.
And if you’re like me, the last thing you want is to print hundreds of copies of a book, only to find out something isn’t working that could have been fixed. This isn’t about being a perfectionist. It’s about fixing problems that become obvious once you begin sharing it with people.
Test your book. Find out what isn’t working before you publish. Don’t make a costly mistake.
You’ll be glad you did.
Thanks for reading!
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You can find my work at JasonFowlerArt.com