Helping writers become authors
J. Tordsen will be on The Author’s Voice Podcast with Donnie Lansdale on September 14, 2023.
He will be discussing past projects like the recently released The Gigabooks Guide to $0 Publishing, The Gigabytes Guide to Writing, and the upcoming The 8 Fates of Okteveos.
To listen, you can search for The Author’s Voice with Donnie Lansdale anywhere you get your podcasts.
Gigabooks Press is now publishing its original guides on Barnes and Noble.
The Gigabytes Guide to Writing and The Gigabooks Guide to $0 Publishing e-books just went live on Barnes and Noble today. Gigabooks Press currently publishes to Amazon and Google Play Books.
The Gigabytes Guide to Writing is available here.
The Gigabooks Guide to $0 Publishing is available here.
This is an excerpt from The Gigabooks Guide to $0 Publishing that was written in a special section called Author’s Aside.
The biggest issue I have with hybrid/vanity publishers is that they will tell you how impressed they are with you or your proposed work and that they would LOVE to publish your work but you have to ask them: “If you like my work so much, where is your investment in me?”
I had one quote for $49,000 for a publishing, distribution, and marketing package. I talked them down to $15,000 for the same package but at that rate, I would have to sell 1700 books to break even and there wasn’t even any sort of guarantee of success. They simply said “our other authors did well with this package”. That’s not a guarantee and a line I have heard many times from other hybrid publishers.
If they really believe in you or your work, do this: Demand a guarantee of sales within a specified time frame based on the break even cost of the package. I know that is a mouthful, allow me to explain.
If it takes 1000 book sales to break even, ask if they can guarantee – in writing – that you will be able to sell 1000 books in 6 months. If you do not sell the books, the percentage of unsold books will be applied to the cost of the package and that amount refunded.
In other words, if you get a guarantee of 1000 book sales in 6 months to break even, but only sell 800, 20% of the cost of the publishing package should be refunded to you under the agreement.
This is the kind of investment all hybrid publishers should be able to do if they believe they have an effective marketing system. This guarantee is how you get them to invest in you and your book. It will also weed out the outfits simply trying to take your money.
I ask this of advertisers and media consultants all the time.
The Gigabooks Guide to publishing is available here.
Find the e-book here.
The next guide has been announced and will be The Gigabooks Guide to $0 Publishing. The book will be released on Gigabooks Press in paperback and e-book August 29th, 2023 with Amazon Kindle and Google play to follow shortly thereafter.
The best kept secret in the modern publishing landscape is that you don’t need to spend a single penny pursuing your dreams of being a self-published author – well, except maybe picking up a copy of this book. This publishing system is one that few authors know about and even fewer use. J. Tordsen used this technique to publish The Gigabytes Guide to Writing and details exactly how to do exactly what he did in this new guide.
J. Tordsen, author of The Gigabytes Guide to Writing, independently published the book in 7 days for absolutely $0. In this guide, he will take you through the complete process of publishing your own work with little or ZERO cost.
An author’s name is a brand and the the book is a product. The more money you put into the product, the more you have to sell to make that investment back. Keeping costs as low as possible makes making money on your book faster and easier.
The Gigabooks Guide to $0 Publishing takes you through all of the most cost-effective writing, editing, publishing, and marketing strategies available to the modern writer. Along the way, J. Tordsen will give you advice based on his own personal experience dealing with the publishing process as well as scam artists and vanity publishers – and how to deal with them once and for all.
The Gigabooks Guide to $0 Publishing is a comprehensive template for new and established authors to save tens of thousands of dollars on the publishing process.
The 8 Fates of Okteveos completed its second edit. Then, the SD card that holds the working copy of the book physically broke in half during a routine inspection of the laptop hardware. This could have been a total disaster were it not for an aggressive backup policy in place for the work. In all, 4 levels of backup are in place to protect J. Tordsen’s writing.
Sadly, the first automatic backup of the work failed and he lost about 3000 words of the upcoming novel. Fortunately, nearly half the book was in the hands of early BETA readers after the second edit was completed and the 3000 words lost were in the sections that hadn’t gone out yet.
This meant those sections had to be re-edited. While the original second edit is lost forever, we can look at the word counts and get a sense of how the book has changed since the data was lost.
The following table shows how the book’s word count has evolved through the writing process.
| Section | Draft | Edit 1 | Edit 2 | Edit 2b |
| 1 | 24,112 | 22,098 | 23,013 | 22,982 |
| 2 | 4,392 | 5,286 | 6,453 | 5,438 |
| 3 | 3,086 | 3,397 | 3,471 | 3,228 |
| 4 – 5 | 5,243 | 5.457 | 5,884 | 6,443 |
| 6 | 2,789 | 3,248 | 3,255 | 3,327 |
| 7 | 11,730 | 12,602 | 14,483 | 14,138 |
| 8 | 2,517 | 2,957 | 3,287 | 3,191 |
| Total | 53,869 | 55,187 | 59,846 | 58,747 |
Section 1: This section was in the hands of beta readers and comprises half of the book. The reason the word count is slightly off is because this section had a slight edit based on the BETA reader feedback. It was essentially a simplification of the introduction that was lost with the other 2nd edits.
Section 2: This is where things start to get hard. As I went through the section again, I would come across part of the manuscript where I knew I expanded a section to add detail, but I couldn’t remember exactly why that was. Then there were other sections that were obvious and I easily filled it in even though it wasn’t exactly done in the same way as before.
Section 3: The process of going through the sections knowing that this edit was not going to be the same as the previous was a bit defeating. I tried to lean into it by making the this edit better than the last. It helped but the demotivating factor was always there.
Section 4 – 5: This is where tracking word counts really helped. This section was always an important section which made it easier to edit. The fact I was able to add much more detail than even the previous edit was very satisfying.
Section 6: The same could be said of this section. I was able to add more detail that contributed to the general quality of the read. I think it was generally improved.
Section 7: This is the climax so I had the goal of getting close to the 2nd edit word count. This was how I measured the success of the new edit in this case. Oddly, despite losing a few hundred words, this section is largely unchanged. The second edit only added more detail from the first but the plot and flow is the same.
Section 8: Whenever there was a loss in word count, it always made me think I missed something. I spent hours going back over this section thinking that I forgot something. I didn’t. The ending changed and was better integrated into the story. It ended up being more succinct with fewer plot holes.
While the book lost 1100 words, some sections were greatly improved. Because I tend not to overwrite, It was a matter of remembering the additions I made in the previous edits. For the other sections, I have to trust the editing process to help fill in the gaps that couldn’t be filled for whatever reason. The third edit I read out loud to myself to help catch inconsistencies in the story. If I added content because of an inconsistency I didn’t catch in this edit, it should shine brightly in the third.
J. Tordsen uses a multi-layered backup system.
Auto Backup: First, Auto Backup is turned on in LibreOffice. This is not the same as Auto Save. Auto Backup creates a second file in another location automatically every time the file is saved. In this case, as he works off of an SD card, it creates a backup file on the main system. This is a feature that must be turned on in LibreOffice.
Flash Drive: A manual backup is also done to a USB drive.
Cloud: If Internet is available (it isn’t always available everywhere he writes), a manual backup is made to Google Drive. This protects against bag theft where someone steals the entire writing kit. A process to automate this system is being looked at.
Server: Finally, the work is backed up to a file server.
Process: Yes, even the process can be a backup. In this case, sending out to BETA readers saved half of the manuscript.
Despite this, accidents can happen and no system is completely foolproof. There is also no set system for backups. Three locations is the general rule for best practices with one location in the cloud. Regardless, the system that works for you is the best system.
