Self-Publishing I

Earlier in the course, I discussed how traditional publishing works, plus its advantages or disadvantages. I also confessed I don’t have much experience with that. (Lots of experience submitting and being rejected—also for writing contests—but not actually getting accepted.)

Most of my experience comes from self-publishing. I’ve self-published 10+ books, at many different services, in different formats and even in different languages. Partially because they were unique projects (such as an interactive picture book) that no traditional publisher wanted to touch, partially because I just like the control and managing it all myself.

Besides being a writer, I’m also a graphics designer, a musician, you name it. By self-publishing, I’ve been able to mix many different disciplines and control them all.

How it works

Self-publishing obviously means that there is no “process” you must follow. You have to do everything yourself, and how you do that (or in what order) is entirely up to you.

Below, however, is a list of the general process most people follow.

• You decide between “print on demand” (POD) or “offset”
• You pick your service.
• You input details about your book. (Title, description, genre, categories, …)
• You upload the manuscript.
• It calculates the number of pages and dimensions, giving you a template for the cover. (As it must fit perfectly around the book, of course.)
• You set the price and distribution channels.
• You click a button to publish.

These are just the basics. If you do this, your book will be published, but probably nobody will find it. You did no marketing. You have no fanbase eagerly awaiting this book. It only appears in physical stores if it’s good enough or you make an effort to put them there.

Thousands of books are published each day. Executing all these steps (correctly) is a major achievement, yes, but does not guarantee anything.

Marketing

That’s why people usually add a few more marketing steps.

Beforehand,

• Do market research.
• Make the book available for pre-order a good 3–6 months before it launches.
• Maintain social channels, or your own website(s), where your clearly promote the book and add a button.
• Send out ARCs (Advanced Review Copies).

On the day of the launch, the author creates extra “hype”.

• You might publish posts about it in suitable forums (such as subreddits or you own socials).
• Launch any other reviews / materials / discounts / offerings at the same time.

This technique is pretty universal across all creative disciplines. The launch of a new project tries to build an explosion of exposure, to really make sure the project punches through the masses on that first day. So collect everything you can find an make sure you send it all out on that first day. You can expect most of your sales on the first day, after which it sharply declines.

Finally, after the launch, give a bit of life support.

• Many authors choose series. Because every time you launch the new part, it’s automatic marketing for the books before it.
• Another common technique is to have a YouTube channel or blog. For a few weeks, you publish tutorials or advice while giving examples from this new book.

This isn’t a cheap trick. It’s, in my experience, one of the strongest business models. (It’s one of the reasons I have this tutorial website that, once in a while, gives examples from my own work.)

Combine marketing yourself with delivering actual value.

Merely shouting “HEY BUY MY NEW BOOK” never works. Or, maybe, once in a year. At most.

But never marketing yourself … also doesn’t work. Nobody even knows you wrote a book. Nobody even knows it exists or where to buy it.

So, find a good reason to keep talking about your book. Before it’s published, after it’s published, provide a continuous stream of reminders to people that the book exists. If you spend time and effort in making those reminders fun or valuable to others, they’ll not only accept the marketing, they’ll likely check out your book just because they like you.

Market research?

At the start of the course (How to Sell your Work), I harped on pinning down your target audience and writing the book for them. Of course, this requires that you know what your target audience actually looks for.

To figure this out, you need to do the market research.

Look at books in the same genre. Check their covers, their titles, their marketing blurb.

Look at books for the same age group. Check their use of language, the themes explored, the conflicts inside them.

Your target audience is something to keep in mind at all times, not after you’ve already written the book.

This research can also show you whether your idea is actually viable.

• If you find zero books that are even similar to yours, you might be in a world of trouble. There’s probably a reason few books like this exist. They don’t sell well or the idea is hard to execute.
• If you find plenty of books that are very similar to yours, your idea isn’t unique enough. There’s no gap in the market, no niche with potential, for you to exploit.

Best case scenario? There are a few books that come near what you want to do, but that’s it. Learn from those books. Perhaps copy their visual style of marketing approach. Then lean into what makes your book unique to appeal to that gap in the market.

Pre-orders?

Pre-orders (of a good duration) have multiple advantages.

• They ensure your book is already out there and able to be found for a while.
• You might still be able to receive (and use) feedback on the cover, or title, or marketing. (Although you’d really want to have that polished before now.)
• They also communicate confidence. You finished this book way ahead of time, planned ahead, and follow a professional release schedule.

ARCs?

ARC stands for Advanced Review Copy. You send these out way before launching the book, though the manuscript obviously needs to be done and polished.

If you have the money, you can send actual physical copies. Make sure to clearly mark them as ARCs, though. (In both cover and content.) To make sure people realize this is not the final version, but also to make it less likely that the books end up being traded or sold illegally.

Usually, though, it’s just links to a digital version. The amount of people reading ebooks is growing each year. Distributing the book that way is obviously much cheaper and more easy.

This allows you to get early feedback, perhaps from famous names (in your genre). If it’s good enough, you can put these glowing reviews on your cover or in your marketing.

Print-on-Demand vs Offset

When publishing, you can choose between physical copies (paperback or hardcover) or online copies. Most authors do both … but it’s not that simple.

Many self-publishing services have quite convoluted rules. Maybe they have different subscriptions, and you need to pay more if you want both physical and online releases. Maybe there’s a limit to how many online releases you can have in a year. Or maybe the service does not do physical copies, only online.

This is something you need to check before picking a service.

Additionally, when you pick physical distribution, you can choose between print-on-demand (POD) and offset.

• POD means that the book is only printed once somebody has ordered it. You don’t need to pay anything beforehand. Only once somebody buys the book, an actual copy is made and sent to them. The service you use will handle all of that automatically.
• Offset means you buy a large offset (500, 1000, 5000 copies) at once and store them yourself. You are responsible for selling them and delivering them to customers.

POD is easy and cheap. Everything is handled for you. The downside is that your books are much more expensive (per copy), and the service you use is in complete control.

Offset requires a large upfront investment. You need to create the storage space and the webshop to sell them. But you have much more control and the price per book drops significantly.

Pros & Cons

Below are the biggest advantages and disadvantages of self-publishing.

Pros

• You are in total control of all parts of the release.
• No gatekeeping.
• If you’re able to do it all yourself, it requires no investment beforehand.
• Higher royalties per sale, as all of it goes to you.

Cons

• You need to do everything yourself. This might be expensive. (Marketing, cover, editing, …)
• Traditional Publishing functions as social proof or a seal of excellence. Self-published books are generally regarded as worse, because “anyone” can do it.
• Your price per book is probably higher, unless you invest into large offsets.
• No quality check or any certainty. (Most self-published books sell 0 copies and a good chunk of them have serious grammatical or typographical issues.)
• You’re on your own little island. You’re not making powerful connections, or working together, or using a second set of eyes to help find flaws in your work. (No networking.)

My philosophy

For me, I like the challenge of learning all the different aspects of publishing and doing them myself. I am also in the unique position to actually do it all myself, because of my backgrounds in other creative areas.

But it does feel cumbersome, sometimes, to manage all that myself. To fix another issue with one of the books, to do another round of marketing, to fix the errors in another EPUB file.

Self-Publishing is a high-risk, high-reward thing. If you stick with it and put in the work, you can publish anything and might earn very well. Otherwise, you might spend months with literally 0 copies sold.

That said, I would still recommend learning how to do it all yourself.

Many of the self-publishing websites provide “tools” or “book builders”. You can input a word file, then tweak a lot of settings and push a lot of buttons, to get your final book. Similarly, they might provide a “cover designer” with the same idea. If you don’t fancy doing it yourself, these distributors also offer you paid services to ask somebody else to handle this for you.

Yes, you can use these tools. They often contain bugs, clear limitations or mistakes, but they are fine if you’re willing to put some effort into understanding them.

This means, however, that you spend time and energy learning a new interface. Learning the buttons and quirks of a specific surface. It’s something I call “superficial knowledge”. Once you switch to a new service, you lose all this knowledge and need to learn new “superficial knowledge”. If you want to grow in the publishing industry, this won’t help you one bit.

It’s more valuable to spend time learning “deep knowledge”. To learn how to properly create a book file yourself. To learn the basics of graphics design, which allows you to pick pretty fonts, colors and imagery that fits your book. To learn how to do all of this yourself with the tools you want.

This way, you can switch services, experiment with your books, and keep control—no matter what happens. And all of that for free!

That’s my philosophy. Go for deep knowledge. Learn how to do all the elements of self-publishing yourself. Yes, it takes effort, and you will make mistakes. But it’s much more profitable and useful in the long run.

Conclusion

This was a general overview of self-publishing.

In the next chapter,

• I will discuss the most popular services of the time (and my own experiences, where applicable)
• I will give some more statistics and real examples from my own work
• Which hopefully gives more practical and concrete advice for how to get your own book published (without making major mistakes)

The chapters after that talk a little about how to execute those other elements (such as the cover) yourself.

After reading that, you will have finished this course!