Self Publishing 101 : Part 2

Today I want to continue our talk on self-publishing and venture on into Part 2. To give a quick summary, in Part 1 we talked about all of the things you should have completed before even uploading your manuscript to a POD company: ensuring your MS is in tip-top shape, choosing your title carefully, finding a high-quality professional cover designer, writing the back cover synopsis, creating a publishing company, and getting your ISBN numbers. You can watch that video here. I’d recommend having all of these things completed 5-6 months before your projected publication date. So that was Part 1. Let’s move on to Part 2. If you’d rather watch the video on this topic, feel free to click play below. Otherwise, read on!


7. Set up your account with the POD company you’ve chosen (normally self-published authors go with CreateSpace or IngramSpark)·         When setting up your account with CreateSpace, you can do it as an individual OR as the publishing company you’ve created. CreateSpace also offers the option of using their FREE CreateSpace-assigned ISBNs, instead of ones you purchase from Bowker. So if you’re tight on money or you’re not sure you want to set up a publishing company, or both, CreateSpace is probably the POD company for you.·         With IngramSpark, they assume you are a publisher, not an author. Which means they will assume you already have your ISBNs ready to go and will ask for a sample ISBN when you register. So you need to make sure you’ve already purchased your ISBNs before signing up for IngramSpark. IngramSpark does not offer their own free ISBNs and you also must sign up as a publisher, both of which cost money, so take that into consideration before proceeding with the set-up of the account. 
8. Set up your title·         Now that your account has been set up, you can set up your first title. You can do this as far out as you’d like, even if you’re a year or two away from publication because you can always change the details. I normally set up my titles 8-9 months before my projected publication date. You’ll set up the title of your book, its associated ISBN number, and set a date in the future as its publication date.·         Once the title has been set up on the POD website, you can then set up your Author Central page on Amazon and make your title available for Pre-Order, add the book to Goodreads and create your author page there, and start promoting your book!
9. Set your retail price, or how much you’re going to sell it for in stores or online, aka the sticker price.·         For now, we’re going to focus on PRINT books and not ebooks. The length of your book, whether its fiction or nonfiction, the genre, and target audience do play a factor in pricing your book appropriately for the market. The best way to discover how much you should charge for your book is to compare it to the prices of those in the same genre. In my case, many young adult science fiction books between 300-350 pages fall in the $13.99-$16.99 range. I originally wanted to go with a price of $15.99, but seeing as it’s my debut novel, I decided to knock off a dollar and price it at $14.99.·         Note that you will need to set pricing for different countries, NOT just the US. To do this, just use an online currency converter. You can even type into Google: 14.99 USD in CAD or EURO or AUS or whatever currency you’re converting. Once you get that number, just make sure to round it off. For instance, if the conversion is 15 even, maybe you want to make it 14.99 or 14.95.
10. Set your wholesale discount, or the “percent-off” you’ll give to wholesalers who will buy your book and then distribute to booksellers like Barnes and Noble (normally this number is between 45%-55%)·         A wholesaler will buy the book at a discounted price, then sell the book to retail shops for a small mark-up (because they have to make money too!) and then the retailers will sell the book at the retail price you’ve set.·         I would recommend setting your wholesale discount to either 45% or 50%. Never set one below 45%. Why? You need to try to understand the entire distribution chain and offer your wholesalers and retailers a mark-up that is attractive both to them and to their customers. You need to give them an incentive to buy your book and stock it on their shelves.·         This means that if your book retails at $16.99 and you set a 45% discount, the wholesaler will buy it for $9.34. You will receive this amount MINUS the cost of printing as your royalty. So how much would you make on that one book?·         $16.99 retail sold at 45% discount – cost of printing (normally between $3-$5) =Between $4.43-$6.34 per unit in royalties
11. Set your categories·         You’ll need to decide in which 3 categories your book should be place. IngramSpark uses BIC categories, or “Book Industry Communication”. These are standard throughout the industry and these BICs are vital. For THE ALPHA DRIVE, I chose the following categories: Young Adult, Science Fiction, and Dystopian, in that order.
12. Work through your edits from your professional editor·         Do not make the mistake of thinking that just because you finished your first draft and hired a professional editor that they’re going to come in and “fix” your manuscript and make it perfect and ready to publish. This is a huge misconception of the role the editor plays in the publishing process. Yes, they should catch grammatical errors, but their main focus is to make suggestions on how you can tighten your story and make it more cohesive. They might recommend rewriting certain sections, changing the order of ideas, or even slashing whole chapters. But in the end, YOU are the one who will have to go back through your work and make these changes. Value that experience. Learn from it and grow from it. It will make you a better writer, I promise. Block out a month of your time to go through your editor’s suggestions and incorporate the ones that make sense. And then what? Send it back to your editor. This is a continuous process until YOU, the author, feels that your story is in tip-top shape and ready for publication.
13. Start thinking about getting early reviews for your books·         The time to actively seek early reviews is AFTER you’ve completed reworking the edits your editor gave you, but BEFORE the manuscript goes for final proofreading. This might seem scary because you might think, “It’s not ready yet!” But at this point, it’s probably getting reeeeally close to its final stages. You probably aren’t going to change a huge plotline or delete something major, so the guts of your story are still going to be the same. Find book bloggers, booktubers, and other reviewers that like to read books in the genre you’ve written. This can be done so easily through Google search. You can also get professional reviews from places like KIRKUS Indie and BlueInk for self-published books. This is a great way to gain credibility because you can quote these professional reviews and add them to your Amazon and Goodreads pages, as well as put it on the back cover of your book! Reviews are your friend and if you’re nervous to send it out before it’s completely 100% “ready”, stop freaking yourself out. Reviewers understand that it’s not the final version and keep this in mind while they are reading your book, so you have nothing to worry about. Put yourself out there!
So that’s Part 2 of Self-Publishing 101. I will continue this mini-series into the month of June. If you have a comment or question, feel free to leave it below!






Until next time,