💫 How to (Self) Publish a Book Without Social Media
Welcome to Off the Grid, a podcast for small business owners who want to leave social media without losing all their clients. Hello. Hello. Hello. And welcome to off The Grid.
Amelia Hruby:We are here for a brand new season, my friends. Happy September, happy season seven, and happy book launch season to me and you and anybody who's excited about Your Attention is Sacred Except on Social Media, which is the title of my upcoming book that will be in your hands very soon. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby. And today on the pod, I am just dipping my toes back in after our summer break and bringing you a little bit of a trailer, a little bit of a sneak preview, a little bit of a window into my book publishing process and how I am navigating all of this without social media. This episode is a real mini and just gonna give you a taste.
Amelia Hruby:Then we will be back with full episodes next week and through the fall. I plan to run weekly through late November and I'm so excited to bring you these new episodes. Before I tell you what those episodes are gonna be, I have a few announcements to make. I want to make sure that you know that this show is paired with the free leaving social media toolkit, which includes the three tools that I used to step away from social media and start my business without it. And those tools were developed when I was publishing and marketing my last book.
Amelia Hruby:So you can get that at offthegrid.fun/toolkit. It's linked in the show notes. And if you're a longtime listener, if you already have the toolkit and you love these episodes, I also want to invite you onto the waitlist for the Interweb. The Interweb is our community membership for small business owners, artists, creatives, and anyone who is sharing their work and trying to make money online without relying on social media. So if that sounds like you, I would love to invite you to head to the show notes and join the wait list for the Interweb.
Amelia Hruby:I am not doing a public launch this fall because I'm gonna be in book mode, but I will be inviting folks in off the waitlist before our September retreat. We have a fall retreat coming up on the twenty second that's gonna be such a supportive place to plan the rest of your year. So if you could use that, get on the waitlist for the interweb, you'll be invited in soon. We're also hosting a sales page class with podcast fave, Nicole Cloutier of Copy Poetics. So if you wanna be at that, get on the interweb waitlist.
Amelia Hruby:And we will be gifted with a gorgeous workshop on how to use Tarot in your business with Sarah Dittmore. That's happening live in November. So all of that is happening in the Interweb. And if you looked at it before, but you were like, I don't know if I can make these calls. Now we have a Slack work slash play space where we hang out and share links and support each other 24/7/365.
Amelia Hruby:Or I mean, really, let's be honest. It's open to you all that time, but I'm checking in like once a day on weekdays with my boundaries intact. So if you'd like to be at those events or hang out with me and the off the grid crew, head to the show notes, put yourself on the wait list for the Interweb. I would love to see you in the membership this fall. And that leads me to our third and final announcement.
Amelia Hruby:Which is that my book is coming. You have already heard me say that, but this fall, I am self publishing a book called Your Attention is Sacred Except on Social Media. That book is really the culmination of the first six seasons of the podcast. And in it, I make an argument for why I think that the attention economy totally misses the mark on what attention really is. I talk about how social media algorithms have become so harmful and ways that we might break up with them if we so choose.
Amelia Hruby:And I also offer a method for cultivating your attention like a garden, reclaiming your agency, and reinvigorating your capacity in this very distracted and distracting world. If you wanna hear what I had to say about all of that, what you can do right now is get on the wait list for the book. To do that, go to yourattentionissacred.com or click the link in the show notes, pop in your email, and you'll get to hear a little bit more about how I'm maneuvering behind the scenes and what I'm thinking about as I bring this book to life, especially in these final weeks where it is like really about to come to you, my friends. The book will be publicly available in just under a month, but the waitlist will be able to purchase it before then. So I'm so grateful that you're tuned in to this episode, and please get yourself on the waitlist for my book.
Amelia Hruby:Speaking of my book, many times already. The theme of season seven of Off the Grid is how to publish a book without social media. And I wanna say from the outset that this season is not only applicable to people who want to publish or self publish books. That will be the framing of some of the questions. I've have a few specific guests coming on to talk about book publishing, but we're also gonna get into a lot of the things that come up when we start writing a book or when we think about publishing.
Amelia Hruby:So let me tell you about the episodes that are to come in season seven. Next week, I will be joined by return guest Cody Cook Parrott to talk about Cody's decision to delete Instagram. Their Instagram is totally gone. They deleted it this summer, and you're gonna hear all about it here on the podcast. And we also talk about their upcoming book, Practicing Attention, and their experience with self publishing.
Amelia Hruby:And they give me some sage advice on how to navigate that process. The next week, I will be joined by Tracy Candido, who is a creative coach and parts work practitioner. And she really helps me figure out how to relate to my perfectionism and people pleasing and my inner hyperachiever. And in that episode, you get to hear me have some, like, real breakthroughs around my relationship to overwork and visibility wounds, and it's just a really powerful conversation. So you're definitely gonna wanna tune in for that one.
Amelia Hruby:The last week of September, I'm doing a little three episode extravaganza where I'll begin with a very special guest, book coach Bailey Lang, who's joining me to talk about the book process from idea to manuscript to holding the book in your hands to getting it out there to the people. So Bailey really walks us through what that process entails, and I sort of like confess some of the many mistakes I made along the way because I didn't seek out guidance in my self publishing journey this year. And then following that episode, I'm going to share two solo episodes for September. One on why I turned down a book deal. So Your Attention is Sacred is being self published, but I did get an offer from a publisher for the book, and you'll have to tune in to that episode to learn why I turned it down.
Amelia Hruby:And then I'll also be doing a solo mini episode on why I'm not putting my book on Amazon and what that means for its availability and sales projections and all of that. That's what's coming up in September. It is gonna be such a juicy month of book conversations, my friends. And then in October, the book will be here, and we're gonna change the tone a little bit. Less about everything that went into the book writing process and more about the themes of the book, the sales process for the book, and then some really deep, gorgeous conversations with friends like Grace Allerdice and Casey Zabala and some of my favorite mystical spiritual guides that join me as we head toward Halloween to talk about the divine process of bringing a book to life because it is a magical, practical, logistical, spiritual journey to bring a book into the world, and we're going to dig into all of that in season seven of Off The Grid.
Amelia Hruby:If that wasn't preview enough, I thought that I would wrap up this trailer or include in this trailer an excerpt from an interview that I did earlier this year with Lisa Cooper Ellison on the Writing Your Resilience podcast. We talked about how I've built a writing career without social media. And it was such a great conversation that I thought I would just share, you know, ten minutes or so of it here with you. And then if you enjoy that, you can head to the show notes and listen to the full episode and subscribe to Lisa's podcast. So thank you once again for tuning in to the season seven trailer of Off The Grid.
Amelia Hruby:Your tiny checklist of things to do now that you've made it this far into the episode is to get the free leaving social media toolkit, put yourself on the Interweb waitlist, join the waitlist for my book, Your Attention is Sacred Except on Social Media, and then just keep listening to this episode. And check out Lisa's podcast if you like what you hear. I am always so, so, so, so, so grateful that you've tuned in to this show, and I'm even more excited about everything that's coming in the next few weeks and months, including my book. Alright. Let's go ahead and dive in to this excerpt from my chat with Lisa, and I'll be back next week with a conversation with Cody Cook Parrott.
Lisa Cooper Ellison:I see so many writers who are trying to chase the algorithm and all of the things that happen with that. And what ends up happening is that they're putting all of this work into learning whatever the new thing is, and they're not doing the writing.
Amelia Hruby:Absolutely. Chasing the algorithm will never lead you to your best work, in my personal experience or otherwise.
Lisa Cooper Ellison:I totally agree. So one of the things that I also love about your podcast is that you have this beautiful toolkit that gives us this list of things that we can do if we want to get off social media. You also share your own personal experience in the very first few episodes of the podcast about how you got off of Instagram. And so if people wanna listen to that, they can listen to your story. But tell us a little about this toolkit.
Lisa Cooper Ellison:Could you give us a little taste and give us some things we can do if we're thinking about either shrinking our relationship with social media or we're ready to get off? I think it's probably helpful to know that the reason I left
Amelia Hruby:Instagram is largely because I was super bummed out about how my first book and its promotion went there. So I don't come to this just as a marketer or podcaster. I'm also a published writer myself. My first book, 50 Feminist Mantras, was an illustrated journal that came out with Andrews McMillan in October 2020, which was a really tough year to publish a first book. But as I was promoting that book, I went all in on social media.
Amelia Hruby:I spent so much money building a brand, building a website, investing in social media strategy and photos. I was all in on Instagram. And my book did okay. I think it sold just over 2,000 copies, maybe almost 3,000, which funnily enough is about how many Instagram followers I had at that time. But through that whole process, I became so disillusioned with social media.
Amelia Hruby:And everyone told me that Instagram was the way to sell my book, and I felt like it just didn't work. And so I decided to leave social media six months after my book came out because I realized it was not the path for me and it was not effective as a writer. It wasn't doing what I needed it to do to help me promote my work. So I think that's just helpful to know that that's why I created this toolkit and this list that you're speaking to. Because in the process of deciding to leave Instagram, I had a lot of fear of, like, nobody's gonna remember me.
Amelia Hruby:Everybody's gonna forget about my work. I'm never gonna be able to sell another book. I'm never gonna be able to be a writer. And so to help get myself out of that mindset, I wrote this list of 100 ways to share your work without social media. And that list became kind of the foundation of the toolkit and brings in all the strategies that kind of you have mentioned here.
Amelia Hruby:So when I think about marketing without social media, or if you don't like the word marketing, just sharing your work without social media, I think that foundationally, an email list is always one of the first things that I help people build. And as writers, we should love writing emails. Right? Or we can love writing emails. Emails are another form of writing.
Amelia Hruby:I always think it's funny that, like, writers I will meet will be all on social media making, like, a million videos about their work and totally never writing a newsletter even though writing is in our wheelhouse. Right. So I'm always here to say, like, having a newsletter, starting a newsletter can be very simple or very elaborate. It can be a creative newsletter where you share essays, or it could be more of a marketing one where you just straight up promote your work and talk about events or new books that are coming out. However you wanna do it is fine, But I love starting with email and like grounding it and writing.
Amelia Hruby:And then the other thing I'm thinking about right now is building a bit of a world of like tangible products and things around my work. I love making stickers or zines or these other things that also feel very much related to the words I love and how can I bring them into the world in different ways other than just, like, the book Yes? That I'm working on. So that's kind of the story of the toolkit and a couple of things from the toolkit that I'm focused on right now. Hopefully, that kinda helps with the beginning of answering that question.
Lisa Cooper Ellison:No. That's an excellent answer. And what I would say and you sort of read my mind, you're like, if, you know, you're writing a book, you need to be thinking about your reader. Because I talk to people all the time about how it doesn't matter the genre, you are having a conversation with your reader and you are answering their question, and you are part of a larger conversation of all the things going on around this topic. And so the more you are training your brain to think in this way, the more you're training your brain to create stories that do that work.
Lisa Cooper Ellison:And you can do it with all your flair, with any structure you want, but you know where you're going. And it gives you confidence when you begin to market your book and you try to put it out on submission, whether you are going to small presses or you're trying to find an agent. You know where you stand in that conversation. You know what your book is trying to do, and that makes all the difference.
Amelia Hruby:In some ways, like, getting better at marketing is just a really great way to get better at, like, the other side of publishing or, like, the other side of your book. Right? The book process is all about, like, you and your relationship to your book for so long. But then once it's published, it has a whole readership. And so you have to think about that readership before the book is published.
Amelia Hruby:You can't get it published without thinking about them regardless, as you said, like, can't go on submission. You can't get an agent unless you've thought about who's gonna read this book. And I've just found for me, like, I used to think of that almost with, like, if I'm being honest, some, animosity of, I should just be able to be in my creative process. Why do I have to think about all this other stuff? But something that's really helped me reframe this for myself has just been approaching it through the lens of world building.
Amelia Hruby:And like me and my book and my readers are all in the same world. It's not me or them or me versus them or me begging them to read me. We all live in the same world, and my book is just one piece of that world. Like, all of these blog posts we're talking about or, like, the stickers I mentioned earlier, all of that lives in the world too. And so, you know, I don't want this to be overwhelming.
Amelia Hruby:It's not like I'm saying you have to, like, write a book and build a whole world, but it is a little bit like you get to write a book and build a beautiful world around it and bring your readers into that process. And some of that is marketing, and some of it is writing blog posts, and some of it is like, it all goes together. And that's the magic of being a writer who publishes books. Like, if you don't wanna do any of that, just don't publish your books. Just write them.
Amelia Hruby:You can stay in your creative zone forever. Right. But if you are a writer who wants to be published, you're also invited into this practice of world building and marketing, and I think that it's it can be so much fun. That's the other thing from the toolkit. Like, the 100 ways list is about helping you find things that sound fun, you can do that.
Amelia Hruby:Like, don't do the marketing stuff that sounds miserable. Do the marketing stuff that you can feel a spark of interest and joy in. Like, start there, and then you can build out into some of these other practices.
Lisa Cooper Ellison:Yeah. Another thing from your toolkit is, you know, having some swag. And I was thinking about Laura Cathcart Robbins who was on the podcast, and she had this beautiful water bottle. She had a little bag, and it had a picture of her book on it. And so anytime, you know, she's walking around, it's right there, and that can start a conversation.
Lisa Cooper Ellison:So, yeah, anytime you can build a world and then have conversations about it, that is the blessing of being a published author and sharing your work in the world. And so you have a book that is in the process. But as you think about this book and you think about where you are now, which is not on social media versus where you were with your first book, which you were on social media, what's one thing you're thinking about doing to market that in a new and fresh way?
Amelia Hruby:Yeah. So I'm currently working on a book called Your Attention is Sacred Except on Social Media. It's at a kind of funny stage in the process right now where as we're recording this, I'm awaiting an offer from my publisher. But I'm kind of sitting with this question of what do I want to do? Do I want to publish traditionally again?
Amelia Hruby:Do I want to go into self publishing and do it my own way and take on all the work that that requires? And I've had both experiences before because my first book, I actually self published it first, and then it was picked up and republished by the publisher. So I love every aspect of the publishing industry and of the writing and the publishing process, and I've done it myself, and I've done it with industry support. And I think there are pros and cons for both. In terms of how I'm thinking about promoting this book, I mean, know your question was like, what are fresh ways that you're thinking about doing this?
Amelia Hruby:But I think that part of me wants to be a bit of a, like, curmudgeon and say that, like, I'm doing a lot of the tried and true stuff that I think does work. So obviously, I have an email list and a podcast of my own that once the book is officially official, however that happens, we'll be promoting those things. We'll be pushing preorders. We'll be inviting people to support in different ways. But I'm also taking my own advice around world building.
Amelia Hruby:I'm thinking about, like, what are the zines? What are the stickers? What are the products that I can wrap into this that make it feel like a book, but also more than a book? And I'm thinking about all of the relationships that I and have built, and how can I activate those people to be talking about the book, sharing the book, and putting it out there? And for me, those people are not influencers that I'm like sending book boxes to or something like that.
Amelia Hruby:They are people I know and love and care about. I mean, as I said already, you know, my podcast off the grid has almost a 100 episodes now. The majority of those have been interviews. That's a whole group of people that I've gathered and nurtured and who all have their own platforms. I also think that that strategy is just what will carry me through.
Amelia Hruby:So for me, again, it's email, it's podcast, it's cross promotion, and it's world building. Stickers and flyers and zines and other stuff I can create around it. And maybe there will be something fresh. I don't know. When I thought about self publishing the book, I've thought about, like, do I put a page in the back that's straight up like ads?
Amelia Hruby:Do I sell ad space inside my book? Which is a fascinating question for a book about attention to begin with. But, like, you know, there are so many different things that could happen, and I think like which lane I choose will determine what where I take that forward and how I do that. I'm also thinking about events. I'm thinking about trying to do some things in different cities.
Amelia Hruby:And I think because I'm a business owner and a creative person, I also just feel very empowered to do it all myself. And I think that because I've had experience with the publishing industry before, my expectations are set correctly. You know, I don't expect my publisher to send me on a book tour. No way in a million years is that gonna happen. But might I do it and self fund it or crowdsource fund it?
Amelia Hruby:Yeah. I very well might. And I just feel so empowered to do that. I'm not spending any time being caught in the loop of like, oh, I wish I could have that, or I wish my publisher would do that for me. I'm just like, no.
Amelia Hruby:If that's something I genuinely want, I will sit with it and decide if I genuinely want it. And if I do want it, then I will make it happen. And that is how I think about marketing the book overall. It's just like, what are all the fun ways I can get this in people's hands? And let me tell you, like, posting on Instagram does not sound fun at all.
Amelia Hruby:So, like, I'm not gonna make that my strategy.
Lisa Cooper Ellison:And what I would say is that even though you said these are tried and true, and I would agree with you, these are tried and true. But the concept of building a world around your book, I think, is something that most people don't think about. And then thinking about all of these other ways that we can get our books out there, what are the fun things you could create? Stickers, the bottles, the book bags, all of the things that can get the word out there and do it in a way that is not online.
Amelia Hruby:Okay, my friends. That was my conversation with Lisa on her podcast, Writing Your Resilience. And I have to say, listening back, I was like, oh, what a beautiful naive mind I was in the stage where I was just trying to decide if I would self publish and did not yet know what self publishing would entail. So if you wanna learn way more about how my book process went, all you have to do is stay tuned to this season of Off The Grid. And if you liked my conversation with Lisa, there is forty more minutes of it that you can listen to over on the Writing Your Resilience feed.
Amelia Hruby:It's episode 70 and it's linked in the show notes. Head there if you want more and stay tuned if you wanna hear how all of this worked out. What worlds am I building around my book? How did I navigate self publishing? The answers are coming your way, my friend.
Amelia Hruby:And until they hit this feed, I will see you off the grid. Thanks for listening to off the grid. Don't forget to grab your free leaving social media toolkit at offthegrid.fun/toolkit. This podcast is a softer sounds production. Our music is by Melissa Kaitlyn Carter of Making Audio Magic, and our logo is by N'Atelier Studio.
Amelia Hruby:I'm your host, Amelia Hruby. And until next time, I'll see you off the grid and on the interweb.
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