Back to the matter of the back matter

My novel is written, painstakingly edited, front matter is added, and the whole thing is formatted the way I like it. I’m not going to say it was smooth sailing–because then I would be lying–, but adding the front matter at least was pretty easy. There’s a pretty strict guide as to what goes in it, in what order and how to do it. There are even pretty standard templates for your copyright pages etc. So it took me maybe an hour or so to add it to the main body of text and have it the way I liked. Easy.

I spent most of the night yesterday in doing some research. My house is an absolute mess now, due to me pulling out every book I own–loads it turned out–in order to see how others did it. The Professionals. I’ve probably stated this before, but I’m a huge believer in not trying to invent the wheel every time something comes up. There’s nothing wrong with looking at other books/authors etc to see how they did it. It works for them, maybe it could work for me too. (operative word being ‘could’. Never assume it works for you, just because it worked for someone else).

So after having done my research, I thought I’d just sit behind my laptop, crank it out and finish the job. Boy, was I wrong! It started out okay. I made the following list of things I wanted to include in it:

Call to attention > have them subscribe to my newsletter
ask for reviews
add excerpt for my next novel in the series
Thank my readers for reading it and buying it

I opened my document, eager to get started and finish this puppy when I found myself staring at an accusatory blinking cursor that didn’t move. As I stared at the blank screen, my mind was just as blank. What should come first? Where should I put it?

I told myself it would be alright, poured a cup of tea and started googling for answers. And then the weirdest thing appeared to have happened overnight. Yesterday, the internet was full of sites and blogs and articles about the importance of back matter, and today most of what I could find never even mentioned the ‘call to attention’ or ‘excerpts’! Where have they run off to?!

Two more cups of tea later and I decided to search for ‘call to attention for back matter’. This finally got me some hits that looked promising, but still only mentioned the parts you could include, nothing on the order etc. I confess, I got a bit frustrated at this point. For people who don’t know me, I’m kind of a stickler for rules. I like to do things ‘by the book’ (no pun intended). And, yes, we are Indie publishers, we can do whatever the hell we want! But to me, Indie publishing isn’t about doing what I want, it’s about creating the best novel I possibly can and see how far I can take it. It gives me an opportunity to have my baby published, see it in print, have a book with my name on it. And to me, that is to try and get it in the best shape I can. And the closest I can possibly get it to a ‘professionally’, trad published book. Some Indie writers might be offended by that, and I don’t mean it in a derogatory way, or think of self-publishing as any less than trad. publishing. But to me, trad publishing books are the standard I want to live up to. I aspire my books to be of that same level of professionalism. Because right now, I’m not. I’m an amateur. I’m learning fast, and work hard every day, but half of the time I have no clue as to what I’m doing. But I need a goal. Something to live up to. And if my readers can’t tell the difference between my book and that of a ‘professional’, I’m happy.

But anyway, back to the matter of the back matter. (again, no pun intended) I eventually learned that there are no specific rules on back matter as there are in front matter. At least not for fiction writers like me. (there are some rules when it comes to the order of things like afterwords, indexes, reference guides etc.)

After several hours of surfing the internet, I finally came to Diana Urban’s post on BookBub. The text itself didn’t have much new information, to be honest, but what I found REALLY helpful were the examples at the bottom. It gave me an idea of what to do, how to do it, and in what order.

After I had that figured out, it didn’t take much time to actually put the whole thing together. Sigh. And here I thought it would only take me an hour or so. 0.0

For those of you interested, here’s how my back matter ended up (wordpress screwed up my formatting and fonts etc, but you’ll get the idea at least. I left out the excerpt itself since it would be way too long otherwise:

————————————————————

Thank you for reading DINNER AT DAWN, I hope you enjoyed reading it, as much as I loved writing it. If you did, please consider….

– taking a few minutes of your time to leave me a review. They make a huge difference for me.

– staying in touch with me via my website, MariskaSlieker.com, or my Facebook page. I’d love to get to know you!

Silas’ story continues in the next novel in the Himura Saga, BREAKFAST AT DUSK, that is coming soon!

If you can’t wait for it to be published, turn the page for a sneak-peek!

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Breakfast at Dusk

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Why Back matter matters

First, a big hurray for me for finally finishing my first novel! YAY! The editing is finally done, the formatting is done for the front matter and the main body. (which took a while I can tell you)

But, there is more. (isn’t there always?) There is still the back matter to consider, and if you believe some sources, it could very well be the most important part of your book as a whole. Especially if you’re writing a series, like me. Because you don’t only want people to buy just one book. You want them to leave a review, spread the word about how amazing your book is, but most of all, you want them to sell your next book as well.

Okay, so what is back matter? Back matter is basicly everything that comes after ‘The End’. But the most important/helpful things are:

Call to action > ask them to leave a review/sign up for your newsletter/FB page etc
Cover of your next book
Excerpt, or fist chapter of your next book
other books written by you

In my case, I’m well on my way of finishing the final draft of the second book in the series. And I’m convinced it would be essential to get the info in the back matter of book 1. So instead of running to the printers and publish my book, I’m going to work on the excerpt and cover of book 2. Unfortunatly I don’t have a release date yet for that, so I can’t promote that, and I’m still debating if I should say “Coming in September” or just leave it as “Coming soon”.

Granted, you could always add info about a second book later, and publish first. This might even be the better option if it otherwise means you will have to push back your publishing date considerably. But in my case I think I can have it done within a few weeks, a month at most.

In case you don’t take my word on it, Bookbub did some data gathering of the results with authors who used this technique.

<img src=’https://insights.bookbub.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/using-back-matter-to-sell-more-books-bookbub.png’ alt=’Using Back Matter to Sell More Books’ width=’600px’ border=

Anne Rainbow’s tips on editing

Here’s is one of the video’s I watched during the Women in Publishing summit. Anne is a very sweet, caring person, who helped me a lot with understanding the whole editing process. Although I admit I really LOVED editing my novel, she does bring out one of my worst fears; that my writing (and then I mean the technical part of writing, not the content) is not good enough.

Another thing that scares me is that she, like most video’s I watched during the summit, stresses how important it is to have your work professionally edited. The thing I’m struggling is the cost of that is no peanuts. I had a sample sent to an editor, granted this was before I edited it myself, but got a quote back for around USD 3100,=. (we are talking here about a manuscript of around 90.000 words)
That’s something that I don’t have laying around. My idea now is to have edit the heck out of it myself. (I did invest in a ProwritingAid premium account and read pretty much every book on editing and grammar I could get my hands on) and see where it will take me. It is after all my first book, and I don’t even know if people will like what I’m writing. And then if I made some money out of it, or manage to save some money, have it professionally edited later on. So far my beta readers didn’t mention bad editing or writing, even though I asked them specifically about it.

Sigh. I thought I had ticked the ‘editing’ box already and decided on my course, but with video’s like this, and the solid arguments they make… I start doubting myself again.