🌟Congratulations! You’re a Star! Now What? 🚀
So, you’ve written a hit book (or hit books)! You’re a rockstar on Inkitt/Galatea or on your way to becoming one! Awesome! Your readers love you and your stories. You’ve built a community around your works, offering special subscription perks and exclusive content. Surely, you’ve done all that an author can do, right? Right? Well…there is still one more thing you can do. It’s easier than you might think, more impactful than you can imagine, and doesn’t need to cost you a dime: give the readers customized physical copies of your digital books.
We recently had a chance to talk to an Inkitt/Galatea superstar, the amazing Ellie Sanders, author of The Jewel in the Crown, about her journey with Inkitt, the collaborative nature of digital writing, and the significance of customized physical books. Read on to learn all about her journey! Please note that excerpts from the interview with Ellie Sanders have been edited for length and clarity.
📚Is That a Library in your Pocket, or Are You Just Happy to See Me?📖
There’s a lot to love in our brave new digital world! The novel is now digital, with no print production costs, wasted runs, or distribution limits. Books, available at the touch of a button, speed to digital devices across the world, existing in servers and hard drives, allowing readers to walk around with libraries in their pockets without the destruction of forests or the carbon footprint required to transform trees into books.
Writers publish and distribute their works at will while engaging with their readers. A novel isn’t just a novel anymore; it’s a community of writers and readers collaborating in real time, further complemented by analytics tools and update features so writers and readers can instantly see what’s happening with their books. Don’t believe me? Look at Ellie Sanders’s author wall and see the dynamic at work, or better yet, take it from the writer herself:
Inkitt’s my favourite platform! […] On Inkitt, you get so much feedback! You post on your wall, and you get so many comments! And [for]every chapter you post, you get people commenting. […] When I put [the] announcement [on my wall]saying that [my book was]going to Galatea, the response I got was just phenomenal. [There was] just so much love there and so much positivity! It was amazing! And then there’s another book that I’ve written, which is going to go to Galatea in the same series. And when I [posted]that [it]was going to go to Galetea, people were like, ‘Oh, my god! I can’t wait to see it on Galatea! I can’t wait to read it!’ And I was like, ‘This is great because they’re my first fans, and they’re sharing that journey with me,’ and it just made it so much more special to really be able to bring them along with me. Yeah, it was amazing.
[…] Everything always goes to Inkitt first. Inkitt was where I started. That’s where I found my core base. I’ve got a good following on Instagram, but Inkitt was where I started. That’s my foundation, and I always want to give back to that. […] I feel like if I can put it on there, I get so much great feedback whenever I post a chapter on Inkitt. Then sometimes I get people [saying], ‘Oh, this doesn’t make sense,’ and because I’m getting that feedback, I think, ‘Okay, maybe I need to make this part stronger, or maybe I need to change this,’ and that really helps build the book and make it a stronger book, particularly because I don’t have a huge budget for things like developmental editors.
🌍The Times They Are A-Changin’ 🕒
The new publishing paradigm is fast, unrestrained, and transformative. The very idea of the novel is undergoing radical shifts with the innovation of Galatea’s immersive storytelling app, which layers sound effects, character interaction, and narration into their stories for a more complete sensory experience. You’ll not only get lost in a good book, you might not want to find your way back out of it! So, what’s left? What could possibly be left for you, the writer, to do?
Well, for all its considerable wonder, the digital screen has not yet quite replaced the physical book. There is genuine delight in holding a physical book, admiring its cover, illustrations, and typography, as well as flipping through its pages. And maybe the digital world will replicate this experience someday, but that day isn’t today. And none of this is lost on Sanders, who, like many of us, appreciates the utility of the digital format while still maintaining affection for physical books, particularly those close to her and her readers’ hearts:
The main thing was that I just wanted to see a physical copy of my book. Digital is amazing. As a reader, I like reading other people’s stories digitally, but I love having books. I’m a bit of a collector, and I’ve got all these prized books. And I kind of thought, I want my own books on the shelf. I want to look at it and be like, ‘Yeah, I wrote that.’ And that was my main driver. Then, I got quite a lot of my fans from Inkitt buying my book. […] And I was like, ‘This is great. I’m giving them back an opportunity to own a physical copy as well.’ I think for a lot of readers, the digital thing is quite amazing, and it’s really useful, particularly if you don’t have money to buy books because physical books are expensive. But I think sometimes, when you love a book, you want to hold it; you want to own it. And I think giving [readers]that opportunity is amazing.
📖 The New Premium 📦
Give your readers the one thing that only you can: a premium, professional physical copy of your digital book. In the interactive digital age, traditional publishing is unnecessary, but it is still sometimes desired. It is a luxury item. It is special. Only the books that readers most love and prize need to be published. You can provide your readers with special editions of their favorite books. On this topic, Sanders had this to say:
[…] A normal book from Penguin or something, the covers are pretty, but the insides aren’t that pretty unless they’re a special edition, whereas self-publishers make it really pretty on the inside. […] Different characters have different-coloured inserts, and it just adds a little more to the book. It’s another incentive for the reader to want to buy it. It’s a bit more special than the digital copy in that it’s got all those little extras to it. […] It’s all about the experience. If I can give [the readers]a little bit more and a little more of an incentive of why they should click buy, then it’s worth it.
It is worth it. It’s something unique that you, the writer, can do for your readers and yourself. And you don’t even have to go through third-party publishing services that will take the cost of publishing out of your royalties. Who needs that grief? Instead, crowdfund the publishing for an easy alternative that gets your book into the readers’ hands at no cost to you! That’s what we’re doing at Inkitt/Galatea! Take a look at our Kickstarter pages for the deluxe hardback editions of C.S. Swallow’s hit series Requiem City and F.R. Black’s sensational series Fairy Godmother Inc! The demand for these series has been phenomenal, so much so that we’re already considering publishing other titles!
💡The Bottom Line💰
Digital distribution has made traditional publishing unnecessary. It’s now reserved for special occasions, for those few precious books one must have a physical copy of. The custom-printed book is a luxury item, a gift authors and readers give themselves in recognition of a book well-loved and of the people who made its success possible.
We’re All Ears! 🗣️📢
Do you have a topic you would like us to cover? A suggestion for the next big thing? Share your brilliance! Turn your idea into the next sensation! Let us know!
