The Hardest Part about What to Do With Your New Completed Fiction Novel may not be what you think. Or perhaps what you think is hard is not the same as what I think.

My daughter, Mia, and I recently finished our first novel (50K+ words):

The Giant Forest

Chapter Book for Parents and Grandparents of Preteens Who Love to Read

Monkeys Can Write a Book

Anybody can write a book. A monkey can write a book – no doubt, not a very good book. But if you put a keyboard in front of some animals (same as people), in time there will be enough digits on a screen, that if/when you hit publish you can have a book … of sorts.

Do With Your New Completed Fiction Novel

In my opinion, hard as it is to write a book … a good book, the hardest part is:

• not the writing.
• not the formatting … though that can be quite troublesome as well.
• not getting the book published. Indie publishing does not have nor should it have the stigma that it had in the past.

Making a good readable book available to would be readers, difficult as it can be, is not the hardest part.

Hardest Part about Writing a New Novel

Getting the book read is the hard part.

Getting the book into the hands of readers who will actually flip pages is what is most difficult.

I created a first to do list just to get started on what else I need to do AFTER the book is written that will help to get the book into the hands or on the screens of real people.

Read: Youngest Independent Self-Published Author & Dad Make Money on Amazon

18 Things That Are Hard to Do AFTER Writing a Book

In no particular order other than what came to mind as I made the list.

I need/ed to

1. Create a robust author page (Amazon first, then other book reader sites) for my wonderful co-author – Mia.
2. Create the same author pages for me.
3. Find relevant people to write book reviews – hopefully good ones.
4. Hunt out free and paid (you get what you pay for) sites to post the book.
5. Update this site and my personal site.
6. Thoroughly research the how tos for Facebook and Amazon book ads.
7. Learn the how to and apply Amazon categories and keyword searches.
8. Write a top notch book description. Copy editing and book writing are NOT the same.
9. Follow up with my illustrator to insert chapter headers.
10. Update my nearly defunct email list and recreate my account with the email client.
11. Reach out to my email list and hope they remember me.
12. Create a book launch plan – Kindle Direct Publishing Select, Kindle Unlimited, book launch date – oh my!
13. Follow up with folks who said they would take a look at the book and place it on their shelves or use in their classrooms.
14. Make real relationships with other folks who might do what some had already promised in number 13.
15. Update Twitter and Facebook platforms. Start publishing on those platforms as well!
16. Launch a YouTube channel?
17. Begin work on a follow up book!
18. Take long walks and think of things to do I hadn’t thought of before.

This list is not exhaustive. Exhausting, but not exhaustive. A real question to ask is what did I forget?

Perhaps you can tell me in the comments.

Or maybe you might just want to read our book.