Athena Rayne Anderson

It’s been a while since I lasted posted about my publishing journey for my book, Simple Instructional Design. None of the agents I contacted were interested, life happened, and it got moved to the back burner. You know how it goes.

I’m newly committed to working on my writing projects at least once a week and I made an exciting step a few days ago. For the first time, I paid for a professional review of my proposal. I had a great conversation with Lauren from Gold Leaf Literary Services and now I’ve got a plan and renewed enthusiasm!

It’s a tough decision whether to continue to pursue traditional publication or go the self-publishing route. The internet and self-publishing didn’t exist when I was learning about writing, so there’s part of me that believes that only traditional publishing is legitimate. There’s SO MUCH CRAP being self-published! On the other hand, there’s a lot of legitimate, solid, valuable work being self-published. Also, traditional publishers operate based on what will make money, not what will benefit humanity at the time.

What to do?

I’m going to implement the strategies Lauren helped me develop and try the traditional path once more. If that doesn’t work out in about 6 months, I’ll know I did my best with it and will move on. It’s possible that my book won’t be a good “fit” for publishers for a decade and I don’t want to wait that long to offer it to those I think will benefit.

If you’ve read anything about publishing recently, you’ll know that one of the biggest changes in the last 20 years is that traditional publishers expect authors to have a platform and do most of their own publicity. Ack! This intimidates me for so many reasons. I’m so grateful for people like Lauren who can help authors like me come up with a plan to tackle this issue.

So, in the spirit of accountability, here’s my platform-building plan:

• Connect blog posts related to the book to my LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. (Done!)
• Publish a blog post on something related to the book once a month. This includes the origin of the idea for it, responses from my pilot group, why I think everyone who teaches needs it, and how it can be used in specific settings (like K-12, higher education, corporate training, etc.)
• Fine-tune the proposal and add this platform-building strategy to the Marketing section.
• Contact every local educators group I can think of and ask to give a free, hour-long presentation on a component of the book. The component is TBD… something that fits well into that timeframe and offers a tangible benefit, like “Crafting Measurable Learning Objectives.”
• Submit one chapter for publication in an educational journal.
• Format one chapter into a PDF that can be bought and downloaded from my site.

I feel good about this plan because it seems sustainable. Dealing with marketing and social media are tiring for me, but I think a monthly blog post is manageable. I very much enjoy giving face-to-face presentations about topics I believe in, so I’m looking forward to speaking with local educators and trainers about the book.

Stay tuned for more frequent updates on this journey!