How to Protect and Preserve Your Work as an Author

Disaster can strike in the author world. This can be a computer crash, a publisher going out of business, or Amazon shutting down your account. Of course, there are plenty of other disasters too. But let's make sure that if disaster strikes, you're ready to bounce back, resurrect your work, and live to write more books. If you want to know how to be ready for what you hope never happens, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers, your professional self publishing services company. Like, whenever I buy insurance, I hope this video is something you never need. That said, I think it's smart to be ready just in case. Because sometimes disaster does strike and just when something is going wrong and you think it can't get worse, it can. I feel like I'm describing my entire 2022, maybe a little bit of 2023 too, but I'm turning the corner. If you're a regular here, you know I believe these setbacks, even when they're big, can actually be set ups. So your disaster readiness planning in your publishing business. Get out your pen and paper because it's time to make a checklist. First of all, make sure you have source files for your book, book cover and layout and have them saved in multiple places in multiple ways. We've talked about that whole process before in a backing up your book video. And by the way, source files for layout means the file from the software where the book was put into layout, not just the epub file that got exported from that place. This could be the files from Indesign, Vellum, Atticus. There's several, but whether you did it yourself or you outsourced it, you don't have that software. It doesn't matter. Have those source files saved every month or at some regular interval. Go onto your accounts around the world like Goodreads, Amazon, Audible, Barnes and Noble, Apple, and Copy and Paste and screenshot all your book reviews. If you've been collecting testimonials or editorial reviews or blurbs from influencers, you should also have those saved somewhere, not just on your Amazon author central page. Should you ever lose your Amazon account and that's your storage place, well, they're gone. It'll be very hard to get them back. Having this will be useful for you when you start back up again. You may also just find it useful to have them in one place for marketing purposes. Whether or not you ever lose your account, always be platform building. Because if disaster ever does strike in any form, having your own audience in the form of an email list that you've backed up, by the way, from time to time is invaluable for the quick revival of your author business. This also allows you to inform your readers of whatever disaster and get support that you might need to recover. I also encourage you to have this platform be bigger than email. Email first, but having a community like we have right here with my YouTube besties high fives to you. Efren Delgado, Rachel Robertson, Poetry from the Heart, Sean Hayes, Jupiter Video Vision 99, Mike Herd and Quizmaster China High fives. They are here for me. And that happens over time. Over a lot of noboringbook mugs, which you can get when you comment the day a video is released, and a lot of comment exchanges. Regardless, the stronger your community, the less any big hit will ever knock you down, or at least keep you knocked down for long. Go besties. Next point. Go wide for the win. Okay, you don't have to sell your books beyond Amazon, but if you are wide it reduces the damage that can be done if you get scammed on Amazon or if Amazon shuts your account down. I have videos on both of those subjects. While not common, they are more common than any author would like. The reality is that if you rely solely on Amazon for your author income and distribution, you're giving them a whole lot of power. And when one organization has a lot of power, they can cause you a lot of pain. Like the pain I felt when the US Government took forever to review my case for work authorization and visa renewal. I was stuck and powerless, but I gave them this power when I chose to operate my business from a foreign country. Okay, enough about my pain. But take it from me, Spread the power around so you don't feel so much pain should something go wrong. This means selling your books direct to your reader, or using Ingram to sell your book to Barnes and Noble, Chapter Indigo, or going wide through an aggregator like Draft 2 Digital. It means not making as much money per copy sold, but also giving your book overall publishing business a wider, more stable ground to grow from. Finally, keep a spreadsheet of all your media and influencer wins and outreach. Keep track of anywhere you've done speaking engagements and who the contact was, what the topic was. I did this once upon a time, and then someone on my team spent time doing it and updating it for me. It's not something I've done as good of a job keeping track of as I should have, and I wished I'd had all of this in one place. Not necessarily as part of disaster recovery but in the event of some disaster recovery where you need to ramp up marketing really fast, it would be great to have it all in one place to look through the list and see who you might reach out to as a friendly to help you re reignite momentum around your book. So log the links when something goes live this way you have it all in one place. And again, this isn't necessarily something you need for disaster recovery, but it's just a really smart thing to have organized as an author. And then when your next book comes out, you've also got a ready made list of contacts to reach out to now after you hit that thumbs up button. Because let's face it, that feels good for you and for me. It's time to check out a bunch of different videos. This one is on the Amazon scams to watch out for, this one is on backing up your book, and this one over here is on the Amazon account Suspension Steps let's hope you don't need any of this information, but now you've got it. In case you do.