Naima B. Robert – Advice for Muslim Women Writers The power of selfpublishing Ameenah Diggins
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AI: Transcript ©
Hey. Assalam.
And greetings of peace. This is your sister
in Islam, Amina Mohammed Dickens.
And I'm a writer and author of the
book. There's books there's great there's greatness in
me for children.
And also the bashirah and the amazing bean
pie, which highlights the beautiful and amazing culture
of African American Muslims.
And today, we're gonna be talking about the
benefit the benefit the benefits of self publishing.
Yay. How exciting is that? And we're also
gonna jump into writing for a niche market.
So stay until the end while we jump
into writing for a niche
market. So are you ready? Ready? Ready? Ready?
Ready? Give me a 11111
if you're ready to jump into the content.
Before we get started, if you're interested in
following me on social media, you can follow
me at Amina _diggins
on Instagram
or on Twitter Amina underscore Diggins or Amina
Mohammed Diggins on Facebook. Hey.
Alright. So we're talking about, the benefits of
self publishing. There are a lot. Right? But
today, we're just gonna be talking about 1,
2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Six benefits to
self publishing, and then we're gonna jump into
writing for a niche market.
Alright. So one of the benefits of my
one of my favorite benefits of self publishing
is that you have creative control, meaning that
you control
how you want your cover to look, you
control you how you want your pictures to
be portrayed, you control the content. Okay? So
when we're talking about reaching out to publishing
houses,
a lot of times they'll come back to
you and say, you know what? We love
the book. We love the idea, but we
want you to tweak a little bit. It's
not exactly what we are looking for. Okay?
So sometimes you'll have, like, it'll be something
that you really are passionate about or be
Islamic content
that you want to actually have a legacy
or be a legacy for you,
but the publishing house is not really interested
in that. Okay?
So when we talk about having creative control,
you have complete control
over how you want your book to be
portrayed, how you what content you would like,
how you want your pictures to look, and
all that, as opposed to waiting for someone
to give you the okay on whether or
not they deem it worthy enough to be
published.
So that is one of the reasons why
I encourage people to self publish is because
if you have a specific book that you
are really interested in writing about or you've
gotten a lot of feedback of people that
are saying that, really, I would love to
read a book about this, but then the
publishing house that you have reached out to
were like, no.
We're not interested. Then you can take it
upon yourself, and I always tell people about
being a self starter
and not waiting for someone to give you
the yes, you create your own yes when
you are a self published author. And I'm
all about creating your own yeses.
Okay? Also, we control more of the profit.
When we're talking about,
being a self published author, you can usually
own earn up to, like, 60%
of the profit margin when it comes to
controlling the profit and the ownership rights and
everything to your book when you are
also, if you are under a publishing house,
a lot of times they own the publishing
rights. So if your book is turned into
a movie or screenplay, whatever it is, then
you also still have to share some of
the that profit with the publishing house because
they own the publishing rights. But when you
are a sub published author,
you own everything.
Right? You own it. Alright. Also, we have
this longer longer shelf life,
Typically, for a,
a book that is through another publishing house,
is that they give you like a 3
to 6 with 3 to 6 month window
when they're talking about promoting your book and
all that. But when we,
it's our own right, so we own everything,
then you can lengthen the time that your
book is being promoted or it's, it's being
sold. You know, if your book is currently
selling, it'll always be in print. Like, I
spoke to an author. She published a book,
like, in 2007, and she said, you know
what? It's out of print. It's no longer
available. Maybe you can find a few copies
on Amazon, or maybe you can find a
few copies on eBay. But when you're a
self published author, you wanna start your you
start to reintroduce your book to a new
market or to a new audience,
then all you gotta do is press that
button and all of a sudden well, you
can all all you gotta do is press
order, and then your books are ready to
go when they're ready to the market. So
you have a longer shelf life. If you
want to do a rerelease,
you you control that. So,
I'm I'm probably gonna do a rerelease of
There's Greatness in Me, maybe with a different
cover, you know, in next year or so
and and introduce introduce it to another market.
And I can't have the control to do
that. I have the ability to do that
because I am the self published author. So
that's another thing. You control the shelf life,
meaning you can reintroduce it. You can promote
it as long as you like because you
own the rights to it. And also you
control how long or how frequently or whatever
it is you want to control as far
as when it comes to doing promotions.
So you also do your own promotions. So
some people think this is like a negative
that you have to do your own promotions,
but when you are with a publishing house,
you still have to do, you know, speaking
engagements. You still have to do book signings.
You still have to do promotions. They may
put your book in front of more people,
but all you have to do is find
out who those people should be by sending
your book to bloggers, by sending your book
to influencers
that are in your genre.
And that way you still can have the
exact same exposure for a typical published book
through a publishing house as you have for
your
self published book. Okay? So I've seen a
great successes of people reaching out to me
and being, you know, featured in magazines and
all that is because
I control how I wanted my book to
be promoted. I still,
you know, you know, planned my own events
or been invited to do events because of
the exposure that I got or the exposure
that I planned out for my book. So
as long as you have a marketing plan,
you can
really
greatly increase the amount of books that you
sell when you have things in place, and
you can do the exact same things that
those larger publishing houses. But because it is
your baby, it is something that is dear
near and dear to you. You control
how much from from publicity and how many
book signings you do and all that. And
also,
when you are
a lot of times, if you are the
mercy of of another company, they may want
you to do a particular type of promotion
and you're like, oh, I'm not really comfortable
with that, but when you do it yourself,
you control all of that. Okay?
You also choose how often your book is
actually published. You have you can publish books.
So ideally, when you're talking about authorship, it
is recommended
that you are looking to create a create
a large following
that you publish books usually every 3 to
6 months. And when you are at the
at the mercy of a publishing house, maybe
they were only interested in that one title
from you. Maybe they won't don't wanna see,
you know, 10 books from you. But when
you are publishing and your audience is like
yearning for more, you have the ability to
knock out a book every 3, 6 months
and your book is done and you're like,
I'm just waiting for,
this company to get back to me or
whether or not they deem this book worthy,
then you if your book is done and
you have your pictures, if you have your
cover, if you've done all the work, and
you know what your audience is waiting for
another book, then all you have to do
is go ahead and self publish as opposed
to waiting for some other company
to give you the yes. And I'm all
about creating our own yeses. I said that
in the beginning. I'm all about self starting.
I'm all about self perseverance, you know, to
preserve our own,
you know, creative juices and all that. So
when you're want to publish your own and
you have a book in the works or
you have a book in the pipeline,
you have the creative control on whether or
not when,
the timing you want your book to be
out,
you know, and also how frequently you want
your book to be
frequently, you want your book to be published.
Also, you control your audience. Okay? So you
also control how you can get in touch
with your audience. It is recommended that you
have,
like a landing page for your book that
also captures those email addresses.
So that way when people are looking to
purchase your book, they can still buy it
on Amazon. That way they get it quickly
if they have Amazon Prime, but they also
has it's a gate between you them and
the Amazon that actually connects you. So that
way you can find out who is purchasing
your books. You can keep in contact with
them. You can let them know,
exactly when you have a new book that's
gonna be out on the market. Okay? How
exciting is that? So another way one of
the benefits of self publishing is that you
control your audience and you control how often
you contact your audience. But so what if
you're over the self publishing house, then they
sort of control your audiences and you don't
really know exactly who is reading your book
and all that, but when you're self publishing,
you can create
a gateway or a landing page
and between you and actually purchasing your book
on, like, Barnes and Noble and Amazon and
all those other, you know, book sites,
because you're actually gathering that information from your
reader about your readers. Okay? So,
I I coach people on, you know, becoming
self published authors. And a lot of times
I'll talk to women and they're like, oh,
I have this book and I'm really excited
about it. And it's about kittens that walk
on 2 feet
and I'm like, okay. Have you done your
research? Is there a market for writing about
kittens who makes a lot? Okay. So if
there's not a market
for your book and your unknown, I always
recommend people to write about topics
that have a that people are yearning to
read about. Okay? So
one of the reasons why I wrote Bestiary
and the Amazing Bean Pie, it wasn't just
that one, it was a really important book
for me because I I I was really
connected to the topic, but 2 there were
not a lot of books when I was
doing research. There were not a lot of
books that talked about African American Muslims and
there are a ton of African American Muslims,
like 1 third of the American Muslim population
is African American, but that when it talks
to it, we're talking about
children's book that are specific to this genre
or books in general that are specific to
this genre. They are, like, few and far
between, and you're always talking about what talk
when I would be on forums
and be on, you know, different different circles
with moms of African American moms or, you
know, just Muslim moms or whatever it is.
And they're, like, there's, like, no books that
are they represent,
you know, who we are or there are
few and far between or or they're kinda,
like, ambiguous. You're, like, you're trying to figure
out exactly
who is in the story. Are they, like,
from a different country here, or are they,
like, is are they indigenous, or you're trying
to figure out exactly are who is this
book, like, who is this book about? So
that's the reason why,
I wrote Best Year and the Amazing Being
Pie because I knew that there was a
a a void in the market, and I
wanted to fill that void.
Because there's always going to be people who
are yearning for a particular topic. And a
great way to find out
about those particular topics or to find out
what you should be writing about. If you
write about space genres, which write about, you
know, space, you could be in a space
group, you know, on Facebook or whatever it
is. Usually Facebook has, you know, best groups.
And you can just kind of, you know,
be engaged in that community and find out
what exactly people are yearning to hear about.
You know, maybe people are tired of, you
know,
the the the typical, you know, space movies
that maybe they want. They're like, man, if
I could just, you know, read about a
space movie about, you know, this particular topic
or man, if I could just read a
book about,
you know, flowers
that, you know, I don't know, that bloom
in that bloom in June. I don't know.
But it's, you know, you want you have
a particular genre that you're writing about.
If it's a teen topic, if it's adult
topic, if it's children topics, and you have
an interest, a good way is to kind
of do a survey
or do some type of, you know, put
some feelers out and to listen. We sell
by listening. We sell books by listening
by finding out exactly what people actually want
to read about and not what we
would like to write about. Okay, so I
know sometimes that's hard because as a creative
person, we're like, man, I'm so excited about
writing this book, but then no one's really
interested. Okay?
So, a good way is to find out
what exactly,
is your audience looking for. And once you
publish your first book and you have some
of those email
and you can just send out some feelers.
You know, I'm working on a new book.
What are some topics that you would love
to hear about? What are something that you
have been yearning to learn about, but it's
not it's not out there? Okay? So we
write for to market,
and stores still being creative and making sure
they're still in our genre, you know, like,
I don't write space space movies, space novels,
you know, so I'm not gonna, like, venture
into that because I don't know anything about
it. But I do as an African American
Muslim or as a Muslim woman or as
a career woman or as a speaker,
I know about specific topics so I can
reach out into my audience
and find out exactly what they are interested
in learning about. Okay? So we write books
that people would actually want to buy and
not just books that we feel good about.
Of course, we wanna write book that we
feel good about, but we also wanna write
for our market. Okay? So just to recap,
so the benefits of self publishing is that
we have creative control. So say, for instance,
you know, we you know, specific topic that
we wanna write about and we have a
lot of feedback from our audience that they
are interested in that, We don't have to
wait for a publishing house to give us
the okay on whether or not they would
like to publish their your book or not.
Also, we keep more of the profit,
meaning that you have a more greater profit
percentage. You also keep the rights to your
book. So if your book is turned to
a movie or a play, whatever it is,
you own those rights. Also, you have a
longer shelf life, and you also have more
creative control over when exactly you're going to
be publishing your books and how far apart
they are and how frequently you're gonna be
publishing your books. And, also, you have control
your audience, meaning that you can put a
gateway between you and your books on in
the air. All the people who are buying
your books will come through you so you
can collect those email addresses. You can give
away freebies, you know, that are around your
book. So say, for instance, you have a
children's book, you can give away
coloring pages, you know, for your book as
a free bait, and then they're funneled through
to buy their book on Amazon or Barnes
and Noble or actually through your website because
you can actually,
have books that are sold through,
you know, the major, you know, booksellers.
And also you can sell books on your
own through your own personal website, and no
one can control over how many books you
sell and also the profit that you keep.
And, also, when we're talking about writing for
a niche market, make sure that you do
your research and you find out if there's
an actual audience for your book because sometimes
it may be an oversaturation
of this particular topic. Like, how how many
times do you read about a particular topic,
you know, when it comes to the slam?
But when we are
but if there's a a void, you're like,
man, if I could just read about this,
then your books will sell like hotcakes. Okay?
And I'm seeing that, you know, as a
personal experience, you know, for There's Greatness in
Me, of course, it was a inspirational books
for children,
but I had to tap into that right
market. And as far as Bestiary and the
Amazing Being Pie, I knew by doing my
research that this was gonna be a book
that resonated with people. It was a book
that was very, very, very important for me,
just because it was a topic that had
never been explored before.
But this was something that was important for
a lot of mothers and a lot of
people in our in the community and, frankly,
a lot of people who don't know about
African American Muslims. They're like, oh, I didn't
even know you guys existed. I thought all
African Americans were Christian. Okay? So it's a
good way to,
to make sure that you connect with your
audience by being a self published author and
making sure that people
understand, you know, what your vision is, and
you can have complete control of your vision,
complete control over your profit, and also complete
control over your audience. So I love that.
Alright? So if you want to learn more
about this topic and you're interested in connecting
with me more, you can follow me on
Instagram under Amina_diggins.
That's Amina underscore Diggins. On Twitter, Amina underscore
Diggins, and on Facebook as Amina Muhammad Diggins.
And I pray that you're having an amazing,
amazing day. I hope that your books sell
like hotcakes. And I pray that whatever path
that you take, if it be through a
traditional publishing, if it be through self publishing,
I pray that
that you garner all the reward from the
law. I pray that,
your book has a benefit for everyone who
reads it, and I pray that you have
nothing but complete happiness in this world and
in the next until next time. This is
your sister Amina Muhammad Dagan signing off. Assalamu
alaikum.