Help me welcome author and blogger Lisa Pelissier as she shares about the process of writing a book and designing a great cover.

About MilliM:

Ten-year old Millie is obsessed with evenness, from the height of her pigtails to the distribution of butter and syrup on her waffle. Fortunately for Millie, she lives under the governance of the Council of Benevolence, an entity that seems to be just as consumed with conformity and evenness as Millie is. When Millie and her best friend Silas find a very lopsided, very ugly baby on her front porch, Millie doesn’t know what to do. Repulsed and horrified, Millie, accompanied by Silas, sets out for the city and the brazen symmetry of the Council of Benevolence, sure that they can make everything right again. It is only while she is there that she discovers that what you see is not always what you get.

About Lisa:

Lisa Pelissier lives in Oregon where she is a homeschool mother of four and self-published author of five middle-grade fiction novels, as well as two early-readers' chapter books and a YA fantasy novel. Lisa owns SneakerBlossom Books, offering Christian, classical homeschool study guides and curriculum. She also works as a freelance copy editor, copy writer, and virtual assistant. She blogs at EleventhWillow.com, a site she and two friends started for Christians parenting the mentally ill. In her spare time Lisa enjoys making art, playing the piano, and fretting about things over which she has no control.

Connect Online:

Website: https://www.sneakerblossom.com/ 
Email: sneakerblossom (at) yahoo.com
Blog: https://www.eleventhwillow.com/ 
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lisa.pelissier.author 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lisaedkela/ 
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/edkela/ 
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Lisa-Pelissier/author/B08794GCR1

Buy Link for MillilM: https://www.amazon.com/MilliM-Lisa-Pelissier/dp/B08767B3GF

About the Process

I self-published my first book, MilliM, almost exactly four years ago. It felt like jumping off a cliff into the unknown.  It’s been an interesting and enjoyable journey. Like I’ve said from the beginning, “Now that I know how easy it is to self-publish, I’m going to be a menace!” I’ve published over 140 books and study guides in the past four years. If that’s not menacing, I don’t know what is. But all kidding aside (well, most of it anyhow), I wanted to share some things I’ve learned along the way.

The first thing I learned was that there was value in jumping off a cliff before I felt ready. I had to let go of perfectionism to say, “Now or never.” My first edition of MilliM was far from perfect. There were typos. There were formatting errors. And the cover art stank. But I did it. I got it out there. A few practical tips from four years into the Amazon publishing process:

·      Use their book templates. You’ll save yourself time and frustration.

·      If you’re including images with captions, embed the text inside the image. If the caption is not built into the image, they will be separated in the e-book.

·      Count on your cover art needing to be revised several times over before you get things to fit just right.

·      Learning how to use headers, footers, and page numbers in Word is super helpful.

·      Use the automatic Table of Contents creator in Word. It’s a beautiful thing.

·      Learn to make a non-breaking space in your document. This is great when you don’t want a phrase to break in half for a new line of text. I use this for many things, among them, Bible verses, where I don’t want, say “John” and “3:16,” to appear on different lines. Even though you can manually manipulate this in a print document, in an e-book, the user chooses the text size, which affects line breaks. There are also non-breaking hyphens.

The second thing I’ve learned is that marketing is absolutely essential if you want to sell books. Millions of books are available on Amazon. The only way for people to discover yours is if you tell them about it. This is difficult. As a rule, writers and salespeople are radically different personality types. Even if you’d rather spend all day doing Algebra than promoting yourself, you have to do it.

While writing is such a soulish endeavor—you throw your entire heart and all your angsty pain into your writing—aiming at commercial success isn’t wrong. Entertainment, especially clean, wholesome entertainment, is a good thing. People need an escape sometimes—something to make them smile.

So be encouraged. Everyone is writing a book, at least in the back of their mind. Some start putting their book on paper (or the computer, as the case may be). A few finish writing their book. And even fewer publish. Do the thing. You won’t regret it.