Guest Post: Chris Loke

Hello Everyone! I hope you all had a fantastic weekend! Please welcome guest blogger Chris Loke. Chris is the CEO of his own publishing company, entitled Jolly Fish Press. Jolly Fish is a fledgling publishing house actively looking for new clients. (In fact, Yours Truly even has a book slated for release with them late next year!) Chris has also recently become a first time author with his debut novel, The Housekeeper's Son. (Look for a review of this book on my blog later this month.)

I asked Chris to talk to us about what it's like to be published for the first time. Here's what he had to say:

It’s great to be published, even for a publishing pundit like me. Being an author means a lot of things for an author who’ve been working on a novel for years. It means that you’ve been officially “canonized” in the publishing world. It’s a great feeling, because your book—the story that begs to be told forever and a year ago—is now in the hands of readers. Finally, you can rest and breathe a long sigh of relief. Your dream has come true. Or has it?
 Though the long and tedious process of writing—the creative stage of the book—is complete, the real journey of your book has just begun. Once your novel is published, it now enters the second stage: marketing and publicity. And no matter how beautiful your book looks or reads, if you don’t pass this stage, your book goes nowhere, and in many ways, you’d have achieved only half of your dream. The marketing and publicity stage is when you move your book from the shelf to the hands of readers. This is a crucial stage in the publishing world, because a book is nothing if it is not read.
 As an author, writing a book is the easy part—we’re all creatives, and challenging as it might, writing is one innate ability that comes naturally to us. If not, we’d not be writers. What comes after the writing and the publishing is the difficult part, because while we are all writers, not all of us are marketers.
 As today’s authors, we cannot be a bunch of social invalids who are only good at writing. We can’t just coop ourselves up in a corner of a dimly lit room churning out words on a page anymore. We are more than that—at least we should be. We need to be advocates of literature and the novels we write. Thus, we need to interact and be the face of our own brand. This process, to many, is not the easiest. But as we all know, difficult does not always mean impossible.
 As we connect with readers and fans of the genre we write, we build a two-way dialogue with readers and build a fan-base. This fan-base will be your first round of readers who may buy your book. And if you have, one way or another, captured the hearts of your readers with your story, then you’d have embarked on a wondrous journey of successful book-selling, for word of mouth is the best marketing tool an author can ever get. Once people are talking about your book, you will have done a good job.
 My advice to writers is this: Write a good book, take time to edit and perfect it, get it published, and then market the heck out of it. Or in the words of my long-dead and once-national-pingpong-grandmaster Aunt Marjory, bring it!

Follow Chris on his blog: A Writer's Notebook, on Facebook at Christopher Loke, and on Twitter @christopherloke .

Check out his book, The Housekeeper's Son  as well! :D

Happy Monday!

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