Where do I begin? What an experience it has been, to self-publish with SPP!
At first, I was very daunted by the reality of the work involved with self-publishing. I wanted that elusive deal with a top literary agent – but it never happened. I just got loads of painful rejections instead. Fortunately, I didn’t let it put me off. I had absolute faith that my book was very well written and worth reading and when I discovered SPP, I knew instinctively that they were the right team for me.
They were superb all the way through the whole process. I had accidentally gathered a large following on Facebook thanks to my free weekly book episodes that I had been writing during lockdown. So I knew I had the support of thousands of people who enjoyed reading about me, my life on the farm and my writing journey. However, I was still very nervous about all the promotion. The adverts, the media articles – all of this had to be done by me because I couldn’t afford to pay anyone to do this. Also, I didn’t have faith that a company would put as much effort in as I would myself. So using my ‘skill’ as a writer I created my own press release which got me 6 newspaper articles and 5 magazine articles – 2 of which are the best-selling horse magazines and 1 is a major, best-selling women’s magazine. (You don’t need to waste your money on super expensive PR people who claim to have media contacts but, in many cases don’t!) Remember you are a writer! You can do this better than anyone.
All of this pre-launch publicity led to my book launch being a huge success resulting in a local field having to be used for all the cars to park! My presence on social media attracted the attention of BBC Radio Leeds and BBC Look North which was great fun too plus that led to more articles and blogs on various literary consultancy websites and book blogger websites.
So if I can do this, so can you! You don’t need luck you just need to be as single minded as a Bull Terrier…
