Fiery Wine Library: APE Book Review, A Light For Writer Path

January 7th, 2013, Guy Kawasaki and Shawn Welch has launch a book with its title 'APE : Author, Publishing and Entrepreneur'. It's a book focusing on how to self publishing or known as "artisanal publishing" (Mr. Kawasaki's terms) and why you should do it. I already read the book found it as wonderful guideline for a writer. If you are a writer, you should read it also.

The book consist with 3 main parts just like the title itself, Author, Publisher and Entrepreneur. Each of these parts divided into several chapters that I believe are the main issues for all the writers. This each chapter is just like step by step tutorial for writer to see the bigger picture about writing, publishing and marketing a book. The more you read the book the more you know the real fact about the publishing industry pipeline and how should you act to solving the issues you face.

In the first part of APE, Author, you will take a perspective as an author from reason behind your writing activities, a deeper insight about traditional publishing world, the movement and development of self publishing, what tools you already have and what you should consider to have in the future, writing in the right way and how to finance your finished script to make it a book and share it to the world. The last issue is something that really attract me and maybe a lot of writers in the world also. Sometimes financial issues could be the big part in breaking writers' motivation since they thing they don't have sufficient resource. Read it and you will start to find ideas to solve it and you will see it's not complicated as it seems.

Next activities in the writing world, publish it. Welcome to the second part of APE book, this one you don't want to and you shouldn't miss. See, publishing a book has become the biggest problem and main issue in the writing world all this long. Like it or not, the fact it's just like the hardest part to get your ass in the industry. You may has a better novel compare to one in the market but it won't worth something until it's published. You may have a wonderful non-fiction guide that can help a lot of persons in this world, but what will you do with your script if it's not published. In this part of the book, you will get the asnwer. All you need to know and all of the options that you have but you didn't realize all this long. For me who start from zero, I always try to find things and guide on the web, the more I search, the more I read, the more my mind mess up because it's divided into parts and different source provide you different information. Read this part and you will see why I said you will get the answer.

Now, imagine your job as an author is done, writing is done and you start to become a publisher. With all the right guidance you have and options, now the book already published and it's on the market. What is the next step? The book is published, good look, the content is wonderful, and people who have read it just rated it as 5 star book category, is there something we can do? The answer is yes we do have things to do. It's the selling and marketing your products. Spread the words so more people will know about it, what will the get from this book and why they can get it from your book.

Here's the fact, there are millions of book out there, maybe even billion. That fact means a billion same product and if someone buy your book they buy one from a billion out there. Still considering to sit down and wait? Well, if you do then I believe you just want to see your work is out there but never do any action to maximize your ideas and share it to the world. This is what the third part of the APE book talk about. Marketing and marketing and you should know that Mr Kawasaki is one the best marketer out there in the world. This is his expertise, and if you don't believe please read his book Enchanted. The third part will teach us how to market our book in many ways and how to do it in the right way. From social media to platform, pitch blogger to reviewers, all of it provided in APE book.

I got this book from Mr. Kawasaki himself after put the APE cover picture as my G+ cover. I am very proud to say that I might be the first Indonesian who own the APE. I want to be a writer and that's the reason I read this book. And after I read it, I found it very useful for me who just want to start my own writing and that's why I share my short opinion in here. Last night, I checked the Amazon about this book and from 210 reviews, the average rating is 5 star. So I believe it's not only me whom you heard that recommend this book.

You can found the community of this book on G+ and also participate in twitter at #apethebook. If you interested in this book, you can find it on Amazon. I will links at the bottom of this post so you can access it quicker. I hope you guys have a wonderful weekend and thanks for reading this post.