Well, it finally happened…
After years of
preparation, we finally released our first book! And a second. And a third.
Yeah, it’s been quite a productive year here at MW Press, so we’ve wanted to
break down what’s happened during the 2024 calendar year and some of the
biggest lessons we’ve learned.
- April 2024: Release of Drowned Sea Book (E-Book and Print)
- April 2024: Release of Tooth and Nail Book (E-Book only)
- May 2024: Release of Drowned Sea Audiobook
- December 2024: Release of Crimson Ink Book (E-Book and Print)
From this process, we’ve
learned a surprising amount about writing, publishing, and marketing. While
we’ve had some experience writing stories for several years now—having worked
together on drafts of various books, those currently published or soon to
be—publishing a completed book was something new to us in 2024.
So, for those who are
curious, we’ll briefly break down the publishing steps necessary to take a book
from drafted to distributed:
- Forming a Publishing House LLC
- Proofreading the Drafted Manuscript
- Submitting Manuscript for Copyright Registration
- Acquiring ISBNs, Barcodes, and LCCNs for Commercial Distribution
- Adding Front Matter and End Matter to the Manuscript (creating a “book”)
- Formatting the Book
- Designing the Book’s Cover
- Upload Files to Distribution Channels
You’ll notice we don’t
actually use the word publish above—frankly, the entire process is
publishing. As self-publishing author, we’ve learned that the so-called
“publish button” doesn’t exist. Trust us, we looked for it… The closest
equivalent is distribution, wherein we’d upload a book and cover for
distribution on various retail websites (like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple
Books, Kobo, and Google Play). Herein, the distributors also act as the
printing presses, printing and binding our books.
It’s quite a lengthy
process. Our notes on these various steps are a book in itself (approximately 100k
words, or 300 pages). Perhaps one day we’ll end up publishing a book in the
in-depth process of publishing. Come to think of it, that isn’t a horrible idea…
Another learning journey for
us has been in the creation of audiobooks. We’ve only released one so far, with
no intention of creating an audiobook for Crimson Ink nor Tooth and
Nail—simply because of the time-intensive nature of recording audiobooks.
Audiobooks are basically
completed in two parts: recording and mastering. Recording is where you…
record. Crazy, right? No, it makes sense, but the difficulty lies in developing
narrative and character voices—that is, each character should sound different from
the narrative voice. And as we—that is, Tristan and Blaise—are both guys with
lower voices and no experience in acting, creating emotional tension and feminine
voices was quite the challenge. But we learned that “feminine” voices just have
to be differentiable from our “masculine” voices. Nor does this have to be done
only through the pitch of voice. Accents, cadence, speed, and intonation are
all variables we’ve learned to use when creating a voice. Consistent voices
are different monsters all together, which we’ve learned to create using voice
keys, sliders, and other useful devices. Are we masters of this? God no. But
we’re having fun learning and experimenting, so that’s really all that matters
to us. With more audiobooks—which we’re planning to do in 2025—we’ll have
plenty of time for improvement.
Mastering audiobooks is the
technical aspect of recording voices. Usually, this entails making the narrator’s
voice more constant across the file, removing background noise, and otherwise
making the sound more enjoyable for the listening experience. Learning how to
compress sound, limit it, add normalization, truncate silence, and otherwise
edit the audio was way harder than we expected, leading to us building a
Harry-Potter style narration studio under the stairs. Why go to that trouble? Because
we wanted to remove the background noise without having to go into a studio and
pay lots of money for space rentals and audio technicians. Was it worth
it? From a money perspective? Yes. From a time perspective? TBD. Learning from
our mistakes was great, but it took a lot of research to get everything how we
wanted it to sound. The great thing about mastering—unlike recording—is that we
can create chains of command to simplify the mastering process.
Despite the growing pains
of publishing and audiobooks, the biggest learning hurdle in 2024 has been marketing.
There’s a saying, “The best writer isn’t necessarily the best seller. The best
seller sells.” Simple concept, right? Harder to execute. For authors,
marketing usually entails creating cool websites, getting readers to join
mailing lists (that means you), writing articles to bring readers to websites,
engaging on social media (gross), reaching out to bloggers, and creating ads to
be released on Amazon and Facebook. While we have the first one checked off,
we’re obviously still working on the others, and really, this is the biggest
focus we’ll have in 2025. Aside from, you know, actually writing the books.
But the most important
thing we’ve learned overall is how to produce a quality book. We’re satisfied
with the quality we brought with the releases of Drowned Sea, Crimson Ink, and
Tooth and Nail. So long as we continue to produce quality stories, we’ll
be satisfied—regardless of what the future brings.
Thanks for being with us
during 2024, and we look forward to sharing more with you throughout 2025. Your
support means the world to us.
Best,
Tristan Miranda and Blaise
Miranda
