Compared to the tasks we’re faced 
with once we type ‘The End’.
If you’re an author or have friends who are authors, you know exactly what I mean.
Once the story is written, everything else you need to get that baby out into the world makes the time spent on your laptop, legal pad or typewriter (remember those?) look like a cakewalk.
If you decide to publish traditionally, you’ll have to make sure your manuscript it correctly formatted down to the exact font, spacing, margins, etc. There are strict guidelines that you’ll need to adhere to. Not to mention querying publishers, waiting for replies and dealing with rejections.
If you decide to self-publish, you’ll need to decide if you’ll do all the editing formatting and uploading yourself or if you’ll hire someone to do it for you.
Regardless of which route you choose to publish your book, you will have so much to decide on and deal with it’s enough to make your head spin. Don’t believe me?
Okay I’m just going to throw out some words and phrases. Let me know if or rather, when your head starts to spin.
- Beta readers
- Should I hire an editor?
- Choosing an editor
- Do I need someone to design my cover?
- Choosing a cover designer
- Bio
- Blurb
- Copyright
- Acknowledgements
- Stock photos
- Fonts
- Colors
- Book trailers
- Stock video footage
- Choosing Music
- License
- Wording for book trailer
- Building a platform
- Blogging
- Social media
- Retweet
- Hashtag
- Promoting your book
- Promotional companies
- Blog Tours
- Cover Reveals
- Blitzes
- Parties
- Should I have a newsletter?
- Do I need a website?
- Getting reviews
- Which platforms should I publish on?
- What the heck is a platform?
- Tagline
- Do I need a tagline
- What the heck is a tagline, anyway?
- Negative reviews
- Will my book sell?
Of course, not all of these options will pertain to you or your writing, but the ones that do can be quite stressful, especially to publishing virgins like myself. Should we just give up on publishing or even writing? Oh hell no! But we do need to make informed decisions. So we ask our published author friends what they’ve done, what products and services they’ve used and what they found beneficial.
My most recent hurdle – and it was a big one – was a tagline.
According to my research Taglines are like the phrases you’d find on a movie poster: short, intriguing, punchy, and attention-getting. They’re different from loglines, which summarize a story. Author taglines help make us more memorable and tell potential readers who we are and why we write what we write.
Once we have a tagline, we can use it on our website and blog, on our business cards, and in our social media profiles. Author taglines give our audience the context they need to remember us.
Sometimes we can choose a tagline based on trends in our work:
- Maybe we write with common themes or settings or characters
- Maybe our stories involve similar obstacles or antagonists
- Maybe our work shares certain moods or tones
To come up with a tagline we need to ask:
- What makes us, us?
- What do we want our readers to feel or learn?
For me, choosing a tagline took a very long time. I brainstormed for a few days, left it while I focused on other things, and then returned to the chore… a few times. So far, my stories are Military Romance, but I couldn’t come up with anything that made my writing any different from the countless other military romances out there. Finally, with the help of my good friends PM Carson and Mika Jolie, I realized I just needed a different way to describe my writing, even if I didn’t feel it stood out from the others. Here’s a glimpse of the torture I went through. Brace yourself – some of these are ridiculously corny.
- Passion fun and adventure
- Where passion and honor meet
- Passion, honor and a shot of adrenaline
- Duty, honor and a taste for passion
- Duty, honor and a shot of espresso
- Duty, honor and a touch of desire
- Where duty, honor and desire meet
- Where duty and honor meet passion and desire
- Where duty, honor and passion convene
- Where duty, honor and passion merge
- Where duty, honor and passion gather
- Where duty, honor and passion combine
- Where duty, honor and passion mingle
- Where duty, honor and passion unite (Hey I think I may be onto something!)
- The pages where duty, honor and passion unite (Ooh, I really like this one!)
- Creating stories on the pages where duty, honor and passion unite
Bingo! That’s it! I’m keeping it! Quick, hit ‘save’!
That. Was. Difficult. But oh, so worth it. What about you? Do you find the tasks of your after-writing to be more stressful than the actual writing? What task are you working on now? Let us know.
Wait a minute. Before you continue, why don’t you sign up for my brand new quarterly newsletter? Each issue will have info on upcoming book releases, signing events, trivia, music, games and of course a drawing for prizes!
Sha Renée
Author
Creating stories on the pages where duty, honor and passion unite
sharenee.com 
Thanks for sharing. I’m hoping to have my book ready for publishing by the end of the year. You definitely gave me some things to think about. Too many 🙂 I went down that road before but truth be known my work wasn’t ready and I didn’t know what I was doing. I hope I’ve learned from my mistakes.
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Thanks for sharing. I think if we continue to network and authors are willing to support and encourage each other, it will help things go a little smoother. I haven’t completed all the ‘steps’ yet either, but I’m happy to share any info, products and services I find beneficial.
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