In the third in her series on self-publishing for Writers & Artists, Cressida Downing focuses on the options available to you if you choose to do down the self-publishing route, and how you can decide whether it's right for you.
By the time this article goes up, some of the information may be out of date. The world of self-publishing is moving so fast that everything is changing all the time. The general principles will stay the same, but you must check the latest terms and conditions before going ahead with any company.
So you’ve decided to self-publish – what are your options?
You can put your book out as an e-book or a printed book, or both. You can offer your work for free, or charge whatever you think it’s worth or it will sell at. You can self-publish at no upfront cost, or you can pay professionals to help you with the process.
Talking first about e-books, once you’ve written your book, you need to get it into the right format. The ‘right’ format will depend on where you’re trying to sell it or display it. For the Apple bookstore, you’ll need an E-Pub file, for KDP(Amazon) it needs to be a PDF, for Nook (Barnes & Noble) it can be a range of different formats.
Nook, Amazon, Apple – they all act as the online booksellers of your electronic book. Once you’ve got your e-book formatted, you can sell it in all the different bookshops at once (unless you sign up to Amazon’s Kindle Select programme).
To get your manuscript into book format, you can use one of these ‘bookshops’ (who are free to use), or a free service that gets your book into those locations (such as Lulu or Smashwords), or a packager that you pay for their time and they do the work for you.
If you want a printed copy of your book, you can go to various different companies who will either give you a number of copies for a set price – which you can then sell on yourself, or will operate on a print-on-demand basis.
Having your own boxes of your books is very tempting – but you will need to pay up front, and you take the risk of losing some of that money if you don’t sell your print run. Using print-on-demand means the book is printed because someone wants to buy it, and the printer takes their costs at that point. This is more expensive on a copy by copy basis, but doesn’t leave you (as the author) financially exposed.
Alternatively you can pay a company to do the work for you – getting your book formatted, and ready for sale. They normally offer a package that includes some element of editing, design and marketing, but read the details carefully as they don’t always offer good value.
So that’s the very basic nuts and bolts – the question now is – should you?
What do you want from the self-publishing experience?
If you put your book up and sit back and wait to become a best-selling author, you may find yourself waiting a long time. You’re going to need to put a lot of effort in, and you will find yourself doing the jobs that a publisher traditionally does.
There could be a reason why a traditional publisher doesn’t want to take it on – it may not be an area that sells. If you think you can find the market that the publisher can’t – then that would be an ideal reason to self-publish.
They are looking at self-published authors, certainly – but they are primarily interested in those that have sold over 100,000 copies.
Self-publishing is getting a much better reputation, but there are also a lot of very badly written books out there. If you think what you’ve written is a first draft, or no-one else has looked at what you’ve written, you risk joining the poorly written end of the market.
Think long and hard about your reputation before you publish. Your writing is what informs your readers about the sort of author you are. Once they get a flavour of your style, they will decide whether to read more of your writing or not.
Successful indie (or self-published) authors tend to be rebellious. They enjoy the independence of making all the creative decisions about their own work, but they do take advice when they think it’s useful.
The question you need to ask yourself is do you have the personality to take on the responsibility of publishing as well as writing?
In the next blog, I’ll give a summary of what a publisher does and what you – as your own publisher – will need to take on.
Cressida Downing has over 20 years of experience in publishing and bookselling and has been a freelance editorial consultant for 13 years for a variety of professional clients and aspiring authors. She is a regular blogger for Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook and runs workshops with them and the Writers’ Advice Centre
If you found this useful, you might want to take a look at the first two in Cressida's series of blogs on self-publishing:
A Series on Self-Publishing: Dragging a Dinosaur Digital
A Series on Self-Publishing: The Bad Old Days of Book in a Bag
If you would like to find out more about self-publishing, you might also want to look at:
Are you ready to use self-publishing services?
How to make your eBook text file into a print-on-demand edition
I think the most awkward thing is trying to fit it all around your day job - I'm quite lucky as I have a number of friends who provide decent criticism and I'm used to some of the media elements, but it is difficult finding the time to do the necessary marketing, promoting and mild harrying.
You'd win your bet, Adrian :)
Nice article. I've self-pubbed and am in the process of being traditionally published, so we'll see how the latter compares as an experience. I HOPE for more exposure with a little less effort on my part since they're inside the industry and I'm an outsider.
Whether that's what I'll get remains to be seen :?
As if the long exhausting, stamina-sapping struggle of writing and editing wasn't enough, would be authors have to learn all the aspects of publishing and self-publishing, and possibly find an agent. I am willing to bet a large sum of money that I am not the only one who finds this overwhelming.