Journey to Self Publishing | mp3 downloadable version | $15

Also, for any of you who may be interested, you can earn an affiliate commission if you become a PayLoadz affiliate and refer others to this product. In fact, you can earn $5 commission for every product sold through your affiliate link!

So far this year I’ve had an average of one speaking engagement per month. The opportunities are varied, but each one has been a learning and growing experience. From presenting a workshop to a group of university students, to speaking for an on-line conference, to being a featured speaker at a women’s retreat, to sharing with a MOPS group, to participating in radio interviews. Above all, these experiences have been a real-life education in learning to trust God and depend upon Him for the words to speak. I recently came across this statement by author, poet, and hymn-writer Frances Ridley Havergal that applies to both writing and speaking:

“Writing is praying with me, for I never seem to write even a verse by myself, and feel like a little child writing; you know a child would look up at every sentence and say, ‘And what shall I say next?’ That is just what I do; I ask that every line He would give me, not merely thoughts and power, but also every word, even the very rhymes.”

I pray that this will be the attitude of my heart, not only now when I still feel nervous and inexperienced as a speaker, but even as I develop greater skill in this area in the years ahead (Lord-willing!). Here are links to a couple of the speaking engagements I’ve had this year:

This is from the on-line homeschool conference that I spoke at in February: Everything Your Child Needs to Know…and How to Teach it to Them (right click and select “Save As” to download the file; left click to open the file and listen via the internet).

This one’s hot off the press (or whatever the radio equivalent is!): An interview hosted by Kevin Swanson on Generations Radio. Posted on July 19, 2010.

If you listen to either of the above and have any constructive criticism you’d be willing to share, I would love to take any suggestions that would help me improve in this area! Feel free to e-mail me or leave it in the comments section.

As my contact list has grown, I’ve run into more glitches with the free e-mail newsletter program I was using. After considerable thinking and some research, I finally decided to take the plunge and try using Constant Contact – a service used by many organizations for list management, e-mail marketing, and more. I’ve only been using it for several weeks, but I already love it! I think it will help me do a much better job of staying organized and keeping in touch with people about new products and special promotions. Plus, after each mailing you get helpful reports and statistics to keep track of how many people open the e-mail, how many and which links are clicked, who opts out, etc. I know there are other similar services out there, but so far I’m really happy with Constant Contact!

And, of course, if you’d like to be added to my mailing list to be the first to know about our latest products and promotions, just sign up using the form below!

Sign up for our Free Newsletter!

If you’re looking for some good, solid information from other authors and publishers who have been down the publishing road, you’ll want to subscribe to this newsletter. In my initial perusal, this quote in Carolyn Madison’s article, Is It Possible to Over Edit? caught my attention:

Oscar Wilde expressed a similar view: “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”

I can so relate! Maybe that’s why I’m such a slow writer…

Obviously, as with any publication that is comprised of content from a wide variety of individuals, you will have to take some things and leave others. With that in mind, though, you’re sure to find a good dose of information (like this article, Why the Obsession to “Protect” Your Writing is Misguided by Fred Gleeck) and inspiration (like this article, How long did it take you to find a publisher? by Charles Noland) in each issue!

Journey to Self Publishing – 12 steps to successfully publish your book
by Natalie Wickham
ISBN: 978-0-9821828-1-9
Media: 80 Minute CD
$19.99

Many people have dreams of writing a book, but consider it an overwhelming or even impossible task. The publishing world is more accessible than ever to aspiring authors, but long-held hopes are quickly buried during the process of trying to dig through the plethora of options available. In this candid interview, author and publisher Natalie Wickham discusses the three types of publishing, gives an overview of the four critical components of a book, and lays out 12 steps that will help you navigate the path toward successfully publishing your book.

And, to add to the sweetness of this announcement, I’m offering a special deal just for readers of this blog. You can get $5 off of your order for a limited time by checking out at SibroPublishing.com with coupon code: BlogSpecial

Also, you can download and print this free handout to use as you listen to the CD.

If you want to make a book available on Google Books, sign up on the Google Books Partner Program homepage. It actually took me forever to find this page because I kept trying to figure out how to add my book from the regular Google Books homepage but could never find the right link. I don’t usually consider myself navigationally-challenged, but the various twists and turns you have to take to find the right programs and portals for some of these book-related sites (ahem…Amazon…) is dizzying!

I was a little hesitant to upload my book to Google Books because I was afraid that it would cut into sales if people could easily view the book on-line. However, you can actually specify what percentage of the book content you want to have made available in the preview so that it will give people an idea of what the book is like, but they won’t be able to read the whole thing. Plus, having Pajama School on Google Books allows all of the content to be factored into searches and will return the book in relevant search results. I will also be able to place a search box on my website to allow interested readers to search for particular words or phrases in the book. A very nice feature. Still working out a few kinks on that one, though!

Also…if you just love the design (cover and interior) of my book and want to hire some professionals to do design work for you (which I highly recommend!), be sure to check out the links to these gifted graphic designers on this post. As you can see, hiring high quality, professional designers to do your book pays for itself over and over again when you can easily upload and make your book available through channels like Google Books.

1. Go to Amazon Seller Central and sign up for an account. Because of some of the verbiage, I was hesitant to do this because I thought I might end up having to pay some additional fees. After a brief exchange with the customer service rep, though, I was assured that this was indeed the appropriate procedure for uploading the files and no additional fees would be incurred.

2. Look for the Search Inside The Book category on the left hand side of the page and click on PDF and cover upload.

3. Carefully review all the guidelines for naming and uploading files and prepare the files on your end accordingly. I created a separate folder for Amazon amongst my book files on my computer so that I could keep these files separate and readily accessible.

4. Zip all the files and upload them via the uploader on the Seller Central site.

5. Click the submit button and wait and watch to see when the Search Inside The Book feature becomes active on your book page. I was pleasantly surprised with how quickly this process was completed (especially considering that I’ve been waiting for several weeks for a similar process over at Google Books – I’ll have to let you know once that one is up and running!).

New Venture Lab – I became acquainted with this company last year when some friends of mine organized a Christian Family Entrepreneurship seminar with the founder, Wade Myers, as the featured speaker. I signed up for a free account at that time to gain access to all the great content on the website. This also adds your name to the e-newsletter list, which is a fabulous collection of success stories, blog posts, business profiles, and more! I enjoy skimming through the newsletter each month and reading the content that grabs my attention.

Pushing Kingdom Business – A guest blog post that was linked to in the New Venture Lab e-newsletter caught my attention because I presented a similarly titled workshop to a music teachers association a couple weeks ago: How to Build Your Brand Through Effective Marketing. The post was written by R.E. Plaskett. His byline was intriguing, so I clicked over to his website. Once there, you can sign up for 10 Must Know Kingdom Lifestyle Business Success Strategies and browse a collection of what appear to be insightful and helpful articles. I haven’t looked over it in depth yet, but at first glance it definitely looks promising!

I fall into the Amateur category, although several of the items are things I looked into doing but chose not to for various reasons. (Maybe that makes my marketing score even worse! Ack!) One thing that I’m really trying to get a handle on right now is actually drafting a written marketing plan with specific benchmarks and action items. I’m also in the process of organizing all my marketing files and trying to streamline them for better efficiency. I can be somewhat fanatical about developing functional and efficient organizational systems because I don’t function well when things are random and/or in disarray – which is pretty much how I would describe my marketing “plan” so far. I keep feeling like surely once I get organized, the marketing efforts will get easier and will return better results. Right?!