Your self-publishing questions, answered

Is self-publishing right for you?

It’s March! Spring is in the air—sometimes. After the warmest February on record here in Chicago, we had wild temperature swings. We went from 70 degrees to windchills in the teens in a single day. (With a tornado in between!)

Chicago’s weather is a lot like publishing: full of turbulence, unpredictable, sometimes stormy.

This month’s Powerful Story newsletter will give you the scoop on self-publishing. Self-publishing has opened the opportunity to publish to thousands of people. It can be wonderful—but it can be heartbreaking if you get sucked in by nefarious vanity publishers who will take your money but not actually help you produce a quality book.

Photo by Elijah O'Donnell: https://www.pexels.com/

Over the next four weeks, we’re going to cover some self-publishing basics. You can find a lot more on this topic on my blog. I’ve taught workshops and classes on self-publishing—so I know you have questions!

Please share any questions you have about self-publishing in the comments, so we can learn as a community! I’ll select a few of the most frequently asked questions to answer in an upcoming issue of this newsletter. But for today, a few basics.

What is self-publishing?

As the name clearly implies, self-publishing is when the author and the publisher are the same person. The author invests in design, editing, and all other production costs, and handles all aspects of taking the book to market.

There are countless companies out there helping authors self-publish. Some are helpful, some can only be described as predatory.

It’s helpful to understand that in traditional, or royalty, publishing, a publishing company pays the author, then pays production and marketing costs. In self-publishing, the author takes on those responsibilities and expenses because they are indeed the publisher. Read more about royalty publishing here.

Once an author has written their book, they need to put on the publishers’ hat, so to speak. The work of writing is complete, the work of publishing begins. They will still hire experts like editors and designers—just as all publishing companies do. Some self-publishers will decide to get some help from an assisted self-publishing company, like mine, to guide them through the process. (I offer a free publishing consultation so if that’s you, click the button below.)

So if you have no money to invest in publishing your book, it doesn’t make sense to self-publish. While you can “do it yourself” with many aspects of self-publishing, you are spending another valuable commodity: your time. You’ll spend time learning, doing, re-doing. You’ll spend time marketing and building an audience. But the upside of spending money and time is that you have potential to keep more of the profits when you self-publish.

And even if you DIY-it for most of your project, you’ll want to at the very least hire an editor and a cover designer. If you’re interested in self-publishing a Christian book, this blog post has more on the steps involved.

Why self-publish?

Getting a publishing deal from a traditional publisher is not easy. So many people self-publish just because it really has no gatekeepers. Anyone can self-publish a book. Access to the market is the number one reason people self-publish.

But perhaps just as important is the fact that self-publishing gives you editorial control.

When you publish with a royalty publisher (no easy feat these days as publishing companies are very selective and typically offer contracts to authors to come to them with an audience and strong platform), they pay you. But that puts them in the drivers’ seat. They will likely suggest changes, make a lot of edits, perhaps even ask for rewrites. So there’s less control over your book, your message, your content. You likely won’t have final say on the book’s content, its cover, or if the book stays in print, which outlets your book will be sold to, and the book’s marketing plan. Although, even if you are traditionally published, you will likely have to do most of your own marketing (even before you get a contract). For more on traditional, or royalty, publishing, read this.

Self-publishing puts the author in charge of everything. The author has final say on the book’s content. They can decide which distribution channels they want to use. They get to have the exact cover they want (though sometimes that can backfire as most writers are not designers). For a humorous look at what happens when authors try to design their own covers, check out this classic Huff Post article.

Self-publishing other advantage is speed. I have a book coming out with a royalty publisher this summer. I’m very excited about it, it’s called Live Like A Guide Dog, and I co-authored it it Michael Hingson. You can pre-order it here.

Writing, revising, editing and so on took us almost two years, which is not unusual. The team finished final edits in December, the book will release this August.

In contrast, when you self-publish, the book can be released as soon as the final edits and cover are completed. For example, I wrote this Christmas devotional in about a month, and got it designed and released in a few weeks, and up on amazon in a couple of days—in time for the start of Advent. Turnaround with self-publishing can be very fast if you need it to be.

How do I self-publish?

Writing your book is just the beginning. Once your book manuscript is complete, you’ll need to hire a developmental editor, who will look at your entire book, and give you ruthless feedback on questions like: does this flow logically? Does it keep the reader engaged? Should a chapter now in the middle be moved to the beginning, or maybe just later in the book? This blog post has more on what a book editor does.

This valuable feedback will likely result in some rewriting on your part. This refining is simply part of the process of every good book.

Once you’ve got a stronger draft, you’ll hire a copy editor to go through the manuscript one more time, to look for details like grammar, punctuation, and spelling. You’d be surprised how many errors slip through the early stages of writing and even editing.

Next, you’ll also need to secure an ISBN number, a13-digit code that identifies your book and your rights to it. Here’s a blog post on how that works.

Next, you’ll hire a designer to do your cover. You’ll decide what trim size you want: a common size for paperbacks is 6 inches by 9 inches, but again, it’s up to you.

Some cover designers will also do the interior page layout. Others just focus on covers so you’ll have to hire an interior page designer. Another option is software that converts a word document into a finished book interior. I use Vellum, which is only for use on Mac. It allows to me select typeface, page numbering style, headers, subheads and more.

The Vellum dashboard looks like this, showing you what the finished page will look like. Here’s a page from a recent project I did for a client.

Vellum costs $249.99, but you would pay an interior page graphic artist more than that for a full-length book. So if you can teach yourself to use Vellum (I’m not a designer and it took me less than an hour to get the basics down) and you don’t want anything super-complicated for your interior, you’ll come out ahead if you do more than one book. But you will be spending your own time (sometimes more than you expect) which is part of the “cost” of self-publishing.

Photo by Polina Zimmerman: https://www.pexels.com/

(If you’re not a Mac user there is other software available but I’ve not tested it out.)

The next step is self-publishing is choosing which platform to use to self-publish. Many are free, including Apple Books and Amazon’s KDP. Next week, we will look at these and other platforms to help you decide which one is right for you.

In the meantime, send in your self-publishing questions by leaving a comment below or clicking the button to send me a secure message.